Film Review: Glasshouse

      

                         Greenhouse

Beware the Shred.

The what?

There are strange notions and weird stories, oddball ideas and yikes! what’s that? categories of entertainment.

“Glasshouse,” a South African-made film, occupies a spot of its own. I’m still trying to come up with a proper name for it.

In a glass house somewhere in the wild lives a family headed by Mother (Adrienne Pearce), who sees her job as protecting her family from The Shred, a toxin that erases memory.

“In a world of madness, we have found order,” she says, though it’s not altogether clear that the kids like this type of “order.” There are three girls – Bee (Jessica Alexander), Evie (Anja Taljaard) and Daisy (Kitty Harris) – and a boy named Gabe (Brent Vermeulen), whose faulty memory seems to indicate some toxin exposure.

We don’t see it happen, but they appear to grow their own food, somewhat reminiscent of the 1970s American hippie commune Arcosanti in Arizona. But this Mother is fearful, not joyfully growing asparagus and smoking pot.

One day the sisters see a Stranger (male, of course) in the woods, which occasions no little excitement. Is he a monster? They take him home, where he is tied up – apparently the “Glasshouse” version of hospitality – “so he learns where to clean up his piston,” after which Mother informs him that if he stays, he must work because “I don’t feed idle mouths.”

“Glasshouse” life gets more and more restrictive until Mother (who apparently figures out who tells the Stranger is) tells him he must leave, when all hell really breaks loose.

Co-writer/Director Kelsey Egan succeeded nicely in making me feel I was in hell, at least for a while. Patrick Cannell’s music (largely strings, with violins and cellos) and Kerry Van Lillienfeld’s production design project the right lonely atmosphere.

If you like weird stories, this might suit you just fine.