house of glass movie review

House of Glass

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Jenny Shakeshaft (Alex) Stephen Ellis (Ian) Alexandra Bard (Becca) Clayton Farris (Nate) Brad Maule (Psychiatrist) Michael Monks (Dr. Freed) Matt Abshire (Brian)

Reyn Del Rio

Convinced of her husbands infidelity, a woman's obsessive search for the truth turns deadly.

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House of glass.

Directed by Reyn Del Rio

Convinced of her husbands infidelity, a woman's obsessive search for the truth turns deadly.

Matt Abshire Alexandra Bard Stephen Ellis Clayton Farris Brad Maule Michael Monks Jennifer Sipes

Director Director

Reyn Del Rio

Producers Producers

Jennifer Sipes Phillip Guzman James LaMarr Bill Dawes

Writer Writer

David I. Jenkins

Cinematography Cinematography

Executive producers exec. producers.

Keli Price Stephanie Rodriguez Randy Stephen

Production Design Production Design

Philip Marlatt

Composer Composer

Marc Vanocur

Sound Sound

Michael J. McDonald Brad Whitcanack Ray Quintana Terah 'Bishop' Woodley II Brahm Patel Casey Stikker Alejandro Villasenor

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29 nov 2021, releases by country.

88 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

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Review by Carlos Lee ★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Absolute garbage. Ian did not cheat on his wife with Becca. Did he cheat with somebody else? Who cares?

Review by Michael Lepard ★

Currently the only review on here. Terrible movie.

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House of Glass by Hadley Freeman: remains of the truth

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Joshua Chaffin

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A book about a Jewish family’s experience of the Holocaust seemed to me like a dive into history, and so a diversion from our current quarantined circumstance. What surprised me, then, as I raced through Hadley Freeman’s  House of Glass , is how much it resonated with the present.

Like many other Jews of her generation, Freeman, a columnist for The Guardian, has gone searching for clues from the past that will somehow unlock the mysteries of her complicated elders and, perhaps, resolve questions about her own identity.

This richly researched and beautifully written book has its share of revelatory moments. Old photographs are unearthed from the recesses of closets.

But there is an enduring wisdom, too: we are all trapped by circumstances — sometimes extraordinary ones. Within those bounds, our lives play out based on character and chance.

Spared the horrors of Europe, she lives out her days as a lonely exile in Long Island

So it is with Freeman’s elderly relatives, whom she first encounters in 1983, at the age of five, after her family travel from their sheltered American home to Deauville, on the Normandy coast, for what will be a final reunion. The gathering is fraught with melancholy and mystery and unresolved conflicts that the young author — like a child sitting at the adult table — can sense but hardly understand. Much of it is in French.

Years later, Freeman is a journalist working in London, and the spell those relatives cast still haunts her. So she endeavours to understand their stories. “My grandmother and her brothers, once so close, took very different paths during the war, and each of their stories represents a separate strand of the Jewish experience through the twentieth century,” Freeman explains.

The Glass family, it turns out, was actually the Glahs family, and lived in a  shtetl in what is now Poland. Amid poverty and pogroms, the four siblings eventually make their way to a dreamlike Paris and — against many odds — set about building new lives. That is, until France darkens and those new lives are upended. This is the tale of a family forced to flee not once but twice, and of the lingering sense that instils that no place might ever be safe for them.

House of Glass is not a polemic so much as a page-turner, as the sleuthing author trails her characters. There is the brash Alex, a member of the Resistance who is heroic in his determination first to survive and then to invent a life for himself in the upper echelons of the Paris art and fashion world. He is daring and defiant but — in a wrinkle that says much about the complexity of Europe’s occupation — also relies for his survival on a close bond with a Vichy general.

At the other end of the family is his obedient brother Jacques, who stubbornly refuses every opportunity to save himself until it is too late. Was Jacques simply meek, or too trusting in France, or unable to recognise the evil before him, the author wonders?

I was most moved by the tragedy of a character who never faces the camps or even occupation. On the eve of war, Freeman’s grandmother Sala is fooled into marriage with a visiting American businessman — a match that Alex cunningly arranges to save her life. She is spared the horrors of Europe only to live out her days as a lonely Parisian exile in parochial Long Island.

Freeman is a poignant and lyrical writer well suited to the ghosts who haunt this book. She captures the claustrophobia and racism of suburban Long Island as well as she does the seduction and decay of Paris.

There is, everywhere, a sense of loss. One death ends a branch of the family tree that was, she writes, “blighted by bad luck and bad circumstances, both of which were made infinitely worse by bad choices, from father to mother to daughter — withered away to ashes”.

An old photo Freeman discovers tucked into a great-uncle’s wallet is “the only memory Jehuda kept on him at all times, until he, too, was a memory.”

With this book, Freeman has preserved the memories and summoned the Glass family for a reunion in which all members are given their due.

House of Glass , by Hadley Freeman,  4th Estate, RRP£16.99, 464 pages

Joshua Chaffin is the FT’s New York correspondent

Join our online book group on Facebook at  FT Books Café . Listen to our podcast,  Culture Call , where FT editors and special guests discuss life and art in the time of coronavirus. Subscribe on  Apple ,  Spotify , or wherever you listen.

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House of Glass by Hadley Freeman review – a captivating family memoir

From the glamour of Parisian fashion and fine art to dark collaboration and the Holocaust ... an engaging, skilful uncovering of family secrets that asks questions relevant today

Hadley Freeman ’s captivating family memoir inscribes itself in the pantheon of family stories that connect the grandchild to the generation of the grandparents. From the Americas (I think of Gabriel García Márquez’s Living to Tell the Tale ) to Africa ( Aida Edemariam’s beautiful The Wife’s Tale ), in an era of renewed identity politics, many wish to engage with the inter-generational connections that skip the parents.

Freeman’s focus – initiated by finding a burnished red shoebox stuffed with papers and secrets – was originally on her father’s mother, born as Sala Glahs in 1910 in Chrzanow, a small town of the Austro-Hungarian empire, not so far from Kraków. She was one of four siblings, and the intertwining of the life of Sala – who later became Sara – with that of her three older brothers encouraged Freeman to broaden her attention. The challenge for the structure and direction of a book such as this is obvious: family lives, as well as the discovery of the details, tend not to be linear.

“When I became an adult, I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking of them,” Freeman, a Guardian journalist, explains. Many will know that feeling, the persistence of regret, of not having had a certain conversation, or asked a particular question.

There is a singular form of communication that exists between grandchild and grandparent, not necessarily in a spoken form. It was finely explored by Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, two Hungarian psychoanalysts who sought to understand how secrets skip a generation and are transmitted from the first to the third generation. “What haunts are not the dead,” they concluded, “but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.”

The writer sets out to know who they are, and who she is. The reader is intrigued by the tales because they offer a way better to understand the gaps in their own life. There is also the question: what would I have done in times of brutal upheaval? Give me a grandparent, it might be said, and I will tell you about the grandchild.

Sala was part of the generation of Ostjuden – eastern Jews – who headed west following the upheavals of the first world war, including pogroms against the Jews. In the 1920s the four Glahs siblings headed to Paris, where they lived happily under the name Glass. The life of each followed a different path. Jehuda Henoch became Jules Henri Glass, married a woman with roots in Lwów, invented the Omniphot microfilming machine, set up his own company and became a successful businessman. The ill-fated Jakob became Jacques; in May 1940, as the Germans approached Paris, he joined a regiment connected to the Foreign Legion, which happened to be the same one my Lwowian grandfather joined, based in Barcares on a beach in southwest France. He was taken prisoner, but returned to Paris where he dutifully registered as Jewish.

The third brother, named Sender, became Alex Maguy, a successful couturier who worked with a young Christian Dior and would, in later life, become a gallery owner who hoped to hang out with Picasso, and then did.

Sala became Sara. She met Bill Freiman, an American man of business and left for the US and marriage, which allowed her to escape the horrors that engulfed Europe. But her husband promised more than he delivered and she led, it seems, an emotionally unfulfilled life in a place that never quite felt like home. She lost her “easy-going” brother Jacques as well as her favourite cousin, Rose, in the Holocaust.

Freeman traces the lives of the four siblings with elegance and humanity. She confronts the mysteries of life that cause four individuals with a similar beginning to reach very different endpoints. Is it will, or fate, or chance, or something else? Such questions flow below the surface of the narrative. Occasionally they reach out with brutal force: could it be that death in an extermination camp is the price you pay for being decent and playing by the rules?

The sibling who stands out is the one defined by the greatest ambiguities, at once attractive and repellent. Great uncle Alex – “small bald and tough like a bullet” – is recalled for the cabana he kept on the beach at Deauville, who, as his great niece records (with admirable clarity), was “suspected of collaboration” during the war, and of having associated with known collaborators after the war. Serge Lifar, for example, a former director of the Paris Opera Ballet, commissioned Alex to make costumes in the postwar years and so offered him a financial lifeline. In that period, Alex records in a personal reminiscence, “my real concern was to get my couture business relaunched”. This is delicate material, the dark side of a beloved family member.

To Freeman’s credit, she lays the material out in a balanced way, allowing the reader to form their own view, not imposing her own. Alex’s “life-saving pragmatism took precedence over his loyalty to a greater cause”, she concludes, inviting the reader to go the extra mile in the case of such fascinating characters as Lifar (I was catalysed into a modest investigation of my own, and quickly found material that confirmed his brilliance and ghastliness: “Jewish culture is incompatible with omni-Aryan culture,” he wrote to the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, in an effort to save his own skin and stave off further inquiries as to his own heritage).

To survive and to prosper may be a matter of chance and strategy. Does one go with the flow, and what if different flows pull in opposite directions? “How much of one’s ancestral identity must one give up to live in the modern world?”, Freeman asks. The question is pertinent once again, as matters of populism, nationalism and racism come to the fore. House of Glass is interspersed with Freeman’s own thoughts on matters of assimilation and social mobility. Past and present exist in a state of constant interaction, and this finely honed and engaging account draws the threads between then and now.

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In ‘House of Glass,’ Hadley Freeman unearth’s the World War II-era secrets of her family’s past

The Glass family, born Glahs, was intensely French and specifically Parisian, precisely because they were born in Austria-Hungary, now Poland. They embraced France with a pilgrim’s fervor.

The four siblings central to “ House of Glass ,” a history of a 20th-century Jewish family as much as a memoir, were outsized characters, each one “an extraordinary force of personality”: frustrating, impossible and entirely worthy of our attention. Fortunately, they are blessed with an incisive chronicler and historical sleuth, Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, granddaughter of the imperious Sala Glass, the lone daughter.

“I found my grandmother difficult,” Freeman writes. “If pressed, I would have said she was ‘weird,’ but what I meant was she seemed sad, and sad adults are confusing to children, especially to ones as sheltered as I was.” Unearthing the family’s nest of secrets and lies, Freeman discovers Sala had every reason to be difficult and sad.

Sala was movie star gorgeous, with penciled eyebrows and a flair for exquisite clothes. In 1937, swaggering American Bill Freiman (later modified, the family had a talent for reinvention) visited Paris, took one look at Sala and declared, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen and I am completely in love with you.”

The Nazis were three years from occupying France. Sala’s brother, Alex, told her that Bill was “a millionaire on Park Avenue, he works in the fashion business” and that marrying him would be the ticket out. More important, he said, “if she went to America she would be able to get the rest of them out of Europe — and if she didn’t, she was condemning them to death.”

It was all lies, a tale worthy of the Grimms.

Bill was no millionaire. He knew nothing of Park Avenue or fashion. He owned a Texaco station in Farmingdale, Long Island, the last possible place for a Parisian like Sala. She never grew to love him. Worse, her family remained in Europe. Of the 300,000 Jews living in France in 1939, nearly a third were sent to concentration camps. Only three percent of those prisoners survived.

A writer spent her career mining her past. Then she took an ancestry DNA test.

Many Glass cousins and one brother were murdered by the Nazis. Freeman’s great-uncle died in Auschwitz, a dozen miles from the shtetl the family had fled from poverty and persecution two decades earlier.

But Alex had saved his younger sister, who lived a long life though not the one she desired, dying in 1994, when Hadley was 16. Sala, to the end, yearned to be back in France.

“As children, my sister and I used to whisper to one another at night about how we wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Hitler, and my father told me he used to think about that, too,” Freeman writes. “Because if it hadn’t been for the war, Sala would never have married Bill and the rest of us wouldn’t even be cells or ether.”

The book’s star is indomitable Alex, who through sheer force of will became the successful fashion designer, Alex Maguy, “the napoleon of couture,” and later a noted art dealer and an intimate of the century’s luminaries, most prominently Picasso. Alex, possibly homosexual, kept his love life a mystery. But his adoration of Picasso was consummate. Meeting him, “I was at the summit of happiness. It was the most beautiful, the greatest day of my life,” he recalled. Alex waged a lifelong battle with his beloved brother Henri’s wife, Sonia. Their arguments are comically absurd in Freeman’s telling but must have been unbearable for all involved.

Alex could not be contained or stopped, and claimed that he had hurled himself out of a hole, created by rot, from a train moving 55 mph, escaping certain death by the Nazis. In building his brand, accumulating wealth and celebrity, a yacht docked on the Riviera, Alex became a master fabulist. A rigorous reporter, Freeman is astonished to discover that the train story is true.

Susan Straight’s memoir is a letter to her daughters — and a reckoning with America’s past

An affecting and ambitious writer, as well as an exacting historian, Freeman tackles anti-Semitism, Jewish guilt and success. Her family’s drive for social mobility through assimilation often came at the expense of religious tradition and the truth about their past. Without her ancestors’ “extraordinary force of personality,” their bold actions, even those resulting in lasting grief, we wouldn’t be fortunate enough to have Freeman or this exceptional book.

Karen Heller is a Washington Post staff writer.

House of Glass

The story and secrets of a twentieth-century jewish family.

By Hadley Freeman

Simon & Schuster. 323 pp. $26.

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More “Split 2” than “Unbreakable 2,” M. Night Shyamalan has finally produced his first direct sequel, the mash-up that is “Glass,” bringing together characters from two of his biggest hits. As the end of “ Split ” hinted, that film took place in the same universe as Shyamalan’s 2000 film “ Unbreakable ,” still his best work to date. The promise of the coda to “Split” is fulfilled in “Glass,” bringing together Shyamalan’s vision of the Freudian brain in the uncontrolled id of DID-afflicted Kevin Crumb ( James McAvoy ), the regulating force of the super-ego in David Dunn ( Bruce Willis ), and the moderator between the hero and the villain in the ego that is Elijah Price aka Mr. Glass ( Samuel L. Jackson ). Once again, Shyamalan is playing with comic book tropes, adding his twists to monologuing heroes and villains who are remarkably self-aware of their own genre arcs. There’s a truly ambitious film buried in “Glass,” and I do mean buried . The problem is that Shyamalan can’t find the story, allowing his narrative to meander, never gaining the momentum it needs to work. Say what you will about “Unbreakable” and even “Split,” they had a propulsive energy that’s lacking here, at least partially because any sense of relatability is gone. “Glass” is a misfire, and it’s the kind of depressing misfire that hurts even more given what it could have been.

“Unbreakable” and “Split” have protagonists thrust into life-changing situations. The former told the story of David Dunn, the only survivor of a horrible train crash, who learned that he was more than human. The latter tells two stories—that of a girl, Casey ( Anya Taylor-Joy , who returns here and is given woefully little to do), forced to discover her own strengths, and that of a mentally ill patient who may be more than your average person diagnosed with DID. 

As “Glass” opens, we know David Dunn, now known in Philadelphia as the mysterious protector called the Overseer and working with his son ( Spencer Treat Clark ), is a superhero. And we know Kevin Crumb has a personality called The Beast that can climb walls and take shotgun blasts. And yet so much of “Glass” is devoted to trying to convince David and Kevin that they are not super in any way. In the pursuit of another twist ending, Shyamalan takes a narrative step back, covering so much of the same ground that the two previous films did instead of carving a new path. He’s so obsessed with ending on a gotcha note that he delays any sort of narrative interest until then, basically forcing his audience to tread water until that point. Think long and hard about what you know at the end of “Glass” as opposed to what you knew at the beginning and you’ll realize how hollow this whole venture has been.

Most of “Glass” takes place at Raven Hill Memorial Psychiatric Hospital. In what could be called the prologue, David/Overseer tracks Kevin/Horde down after the villainous man with multiple personalities kidnaps four young women, holding them in an abandoned factory. The two men fight, and one immediately gets the sense that something is not quite right. This showdown between two of the most memorable characters in Shyamalan’s history lacks the punch or creative fight choreography fans should expect. The pair head out a window and into the arms of Dr. Ellie Staple ( Sarah Paulson ), the confident doctor who shuttles them off to the same psych ward that’s been housing Mr. Glass for almost two decades. Glass is kept in a deeply vegetative state in a room in the same wing as David and Kevin. Dr. Staple tries to convince all three that they are not really super in any way. David’s strength isn’t that abnormal and Kevin’s powers as The Beast could be explained away.

In the midsection of “Glass,” Shyamalan hits every beat more than once, almost joylessly. Paulson gives the same speech multiple times, and a bit with a bright light that can change which personality of Kevin’s dominates goes on forever ... and then happens again. Shyamalan is determined to cycle through the back stories of these characters, even employing footage from “Unbreakable” and “Split” in flashbacks as if he doesn’t realize that 95% of viewers have seen them. He seems so intent on the reveals of his final fifteen minutes that he forgets to take opportunities to make the nearly two hours before that interesting. Why is Raven Hill such a dull bore to look at? Why is Shyamalan determined to make another film about whether or not superheroes are superheroes instead of just building on the foundation he’s created? Imagine “ The Avengers ” retelling all the origin stories and then questioning whether or not The Hulk is really a superhero or just an angry dude.

There are glimpses of the crazy, ambitious movie that “Glass” could have been, and that’s what saves it from complete "Happening"-level disaster. Once again, McAvoy is giving it his all , even if he’s not getting as much back in return as he did last time (and is balanced by another half-hearted Willis performance in which I swear you can practically see him fall asleep). And there are just enough out-there ideas in “Glass” that it’s impossible to completely dismiss even if they don't come together. It’s that fine line between ambitiously clunky in a way that engages the viewer and just sloppy. I honestly kept trying to engage with “Glass” as a fan of Shyamalan’s early films, comic books, and movies that try to mash-up familiar genres in a way that makes a new one. I ultimately resigned myself to the fact that it’s not my fault that it’s broken.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Glass (2019)

Rated PG-13 for violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language.

129 minutes

James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb / The Horde / The Beast / Patricia / Dennis / Hedwig / Barry / Jade / Orwell / Heinrich / Norma

Bruce Willis as David Dunn / The Overseer

Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah Price / Mr. Glass

Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey Cooke

Sarah Paulson as Dr. Ellie Staple

Spencer Treat Clark as Joseph Dunn

Charlayne Woodard as Mrs. Price

Luke Kirby as Pierce

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‘Glass’ Movie Review: A Nutty Ride With M. Night Shyamalan

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By Manohla Dargis

• Jan. 17, 2019

Early in “Glass,” an enjoyable new whatsit from M. Night Shyamalan, Samuel L. Jackson keeps winking at the camera. It’s a character tic, but it’s nice to think that Jackson is signaling that he’s hip to the absurdity. He plays Elijah Price, a.k.a. Mr. Glass, one of those dastardly masterminds with a tragic past and psychotic ambitions who in another era would be twirling a mustache. This being the Age of Comic Books, he instead can be seen furiously hacking a security system of a mental institution with nitwit guards, color-coordinated art direction and a couple of world-class adversaries in neighboring cells.

Glass’s villainy was first related in Shyamalan’s film “Unbreakable” (2000) an agreeably bonkers fantasy that also introduced his Everyman nemesis, David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who discovers his modest powers in middle age. (He can bench press serious weight.) When “Unbreakable” is good, it’s very good; when it’s bad, your eyes roll like roulette wheels. It’s a bit nuts and too often belabored — Shyamalan is burdened by the auteurist need to seem original. But he has skills. Few horror movies get under your skin as easily as “Unbreakable” does when a killer materializes at a family’s door (“I like your house”) a scene that creates the kind of terror that fires up your fight-or-flight response.

[ An interview with M. Night Shyamalan about “Glass”.]

Shyamalan’s talent for primitive scares remains intact in “Glass,” as does his love for cramming a whole lot of story in one feature. A superhero thriller spiked with horror and family melodrama, the movie reunites its title evildoer with Dunn and brings them face to face with Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the multiple-personality antihero of Shyamalan’s 2017 freakout, “Split.”

Like his filmmaker-creator, Crumb can be awfully good or not. Much depends on which personality — the 9-year-old Hedwig, the bossy Patricia, the naughty Dennis — has taken hold, and whether Shyamalan is after laughs or shudders, both of which he routinely coaxes out in “Glass” until he doesn’t.

The sly question teased in “Unbreakable,” the mystery that sets it apart from run-of-the-mill grandiose superhero fables, is whether Dunn is the real deal or if Glass merely wants a foil worthy of his self-aggrandizement. In “Unbreakable,” Dunn starts off as a seemingly average guy, a security guard who’s strictly a Clark Kent. Dunn knows that he’s different (he senses evil through touch), but his powers awaken only because of Glass. When the new movie opens, Glass is under wraps and Dunn has been stealthily doing his superhero thing for a while, sneakily saving the day under cover of the security company that he runs with his son (Spencer Treat Clark, reprising the same role).

“Glass” opens smoothly with some small-scale heroics that set the humorous, twitchy tone and showcases Dunn, who’s still fighting while wearing an identity-obscuring rain poncho. The off-the-rack costume is crucial to his low-key charm and vibe. It’s also representative of Shyamalan’s eccentric, intimately scaled superhero universe, one that leans on quirks of personality and quotidian fears rather than on computer-generated special effects and world-destroying brawls. His heroes and villains are invariably more ordinary — and human — than extraordinary, which raises the stakes and amplifies the tension.

Shyamalan finds a way to cram Dunn, Glass and Crumb into the same fictional universe, but he hasn’t found a persuasive way to make them fit together. He seems to know that, and so, after the reintroductions and other throat-clearing preliminaries, Shyamalan just locks all three in the same mental hospital. There, they are tended by a spectacularly inept shrink, Dr. Staple (Sarah Paulson), who insists that they are merely delusional. The actor Luke Kirby, who’s currently playing Lenny Bruce on the Amazon show “ The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ,” pops up as a hospital attendant, casting that I turned into an imaginary franchise crossover whenever “Glass” started to sag.

And it does with increasing frequency, even if, for the most part, there is enough in the movie — creeping cameras, off-kilter boos, eye-popping mauve and especially its three male leads — to offset the longueurs, obvious filler and rickety plotting. Shyamalan has been celebrated for his twisty stories, but his truer strength is his gifts for infusing outwardly banal moments with dread and for his work with actors. McAvoy takes his shirt off distractingly often (his pumped bare chest is a special effect), but his quicksilver character changes are fun and often delicate. Jackson and especially Willis remind you again of how fine they can be when asked for more than booming shtick and smirk.

In time, the air of misterioso quiet and encroaching, consuming terror give way to manly growling, jaw-clenching and vein-popping, and everything falls to pieces in a poorly conceptualized and staged blowout. (Only then does the relatively modest budget feel like a hindrance.) It’s a bummer and suggests that Shyamalan needed a few more years between this movie and the last to work out the kinks, and maybe a screenwriting partner who could help him separate his A material from his B, C and D ideas. He certainly needs help with his female characters, a lineup of clichés that are never as touching or as witty as he thinks. He’s still playing with genre but not nearly enough, and no amount of self-reflexive winking and meta-patter about comics makes it better.

Glass Rated PG-13 for comic-book violence, including cannibalism. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes.

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