Glass review: This psychological superhero movie is absurdly contrived, even by M Night Shyamalan’s standards

Director: M Night Shyamalan; Starring: James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson, Sarah Paulson, Anya Taylor-Joy. Cert 15, 129 mins

M Night Shyamalan’s latest feature, the third in his so-called Eastrail #177 trilogy (following Unbreakable and Split), is a very brittle affair. Its plot is absurdly contrived, and very stilted, even by Shyamalan’s own standards. He has long specialised in films with startling final-reel revelations and characters who aren’t at all what they seem. Glass has both.

Shyamalan, though, has some intriguing observations to make about audiences’ fascination with comic book superheroes and the deep rooted psychological need that they serve. The three main characters here – Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), who has multiple personality disorder, David Dunn/the Overseer (Bruce Willis), the vigilante with the uncanny powers of empathy and foresight, and Elijah/Mr Glass (Samuel L Jackson), with his razor sharp intellect – are kindred spirits. They’ve all known childhood misery. They’re variations on the puny boy on the beach who has sand kicked in his face but then transforms himself into a Charles Atlas-like bodybuilder.

They are role models for anyone with an inferiority complex. If you can’t be like them, you can at least read about them in the comic books. And one of Shyamalan’s main insights is that comic book villains are often just as attractive as the heroes. For fans oppressed in their everyday lives, there is something very cathartic about seeing an evil genius on a destructive spree.

Most of Glass is set in a high security asylum for the criminally insane. It is here that the formidable psychiatrist Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) has had Crumb, Dunn and Glass locked up. She is trying to cure their “delusions of grandeur”. Staple believes that her three inmates have convinced themselves they have special gifts, like “something out of a comic book”, when in fact they’re just ordinary folk trying to escape the wretchedness of their everyday lives.

Staple’s thesis is of course undermined by what we see in the early part of the film. Kevin in his guise as “the Beast” turns into a rippling, Hulk-like figure who can climb on ceilings. David, when he is in Overseer mode, is possessed of similar powers, while Elijah exhibits a supernatural intelligence and memory.

Shyamalan has three big name actors and wants to ensure they all get roughly the same amount of screen time. We therefore see the psychiatrist visiting them one by one in their adjoining rooms in the asylum. And whatever its failings as drama, Glass is a strong platform for its lead actors.

McAvoy reprises his virtuoso performance in Shyamalan’s Split (2016), playing over 20 roles at once as if he is a fairground attraction. He’ll take on a woman’s identity one moment and that of a roller skating nerd the next, or switch suddenly from Spanish to the voice of a highly educated college professor. It’s invigorating to watch. Bruce Willis is typically deadpan and understated as the all-American ordinary Joe type, using his powers to keep evil off the streets.

Inevitably, the competition here isn’t just between the characters in the story but between the actors playing them. Samuel L Jackson spends the first half of the movie sitting sedated in a wheelchair, doing nothing at all. You wonder if he had a bet with his co-stars before shooting began that he could hold the screen just as effectively as they could even without lines or action scenes. Jackson is such a compelling presence that, through his eyes and expression alone, he conveys a sense of suppressed menace and always dominates his scenes.

Paulson’s psychiatrist seems partially modelled on Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest. She scolds her three patients in a matronly way and takes a sadistic pleasure in suppressing their powers by blasting light or water at them.

As superhero films go, this is very much a chamber piece. Its reported budget of $20m is only a tenth of what is spent on any self-respecting Avengers movie. Aquaman offers its audiences vast oceans. Glass gives them an underwater fight in a tiny plastic tank. You can’t help but feel slightly short changed when a hospital car park turns out to be the setting for one of the main action scenes.

A sense of anticlimax pervades the final part of the film. The explosive finale in downtown Philadelphia that Shyamalan seems to be setting up never quite materialises. Instead, the writer-director throws in plenty of his familiar plot reversals and startling new insights about the main characters.

Shyamalan has never had any problem in coming up with ideas. Individual scenes here are ingeniously staged but there is still a feeling of overload as the director throws in elliptical flashbacks to the childhoods of his three protagonists alongside scenes of them running amok in the asylum.

The line between hero and villain soon become hopelessly blurred. Samuel L Jackson’s Elijah is an evil criminal mastermind one moment and then as pathetic as Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol the next. McAvoy’s Kevin is a killer and kidnapper but that doesn’t stop the film treating him as an object of pity; some of the asylum warders are far more unpleasant than him. The scenes involving one of his former captives from Split (Anya Taylor-Joy) are as close as the film comes to a romantic subplot. They’re wounded souls together.

Superheroes, as Shyamalan conceives them here, are victims of emotional trauma and physical abuse looking for a way to overcome their own suffering. That may make them fitting subjects for psychological case studies but it does very little to generate narrative tension or excitement.