Glasshouse (2021), the feature debut of South African director and co-writer Kelsey Egan, is a dystopian fiction that defied expectations and surprised me. I saw the trailer, actually I watched thirty seconds of the trailer, and dismissed it as a twist on The Beguiled (1971). There are similarities. A wounded stranger is taken in by a family of young women. His presence has a devastating effect on the equilibrium of their world. But there’s more going on than hormonal urgency and a lack of suitable partners post-apocalypse.
The titular glasshouse nestles in an oasis of lush green, hidden among the rocks of an otherwise featureless wasteland. Mother and her three daughters survive with their adolescent brother in guarded isolation, tending to their food garden, hand pollenating their plants, and keeping watch for strangers.
They use these rituals and cobbled together respirators to shield themselves from the devastation of “the shred”, a toxin in the air that destroys people’s memories, making them dangerously violent. Accordingly trespassers are routinely shot on sight, their corpses dismembered, and buried as fertiliser in their garden. There’s no fear in the girls actions, it’s just the order of things.
How long they’ve lived like this is anyone’s guess. Where they sit in history is never revealed. Mother looks like a Victorian lady, corseted dresses and long hair neatly arranged. The young women spend most of their time in an assortment of chemise and bloomers. These white linens against the lush green vegetation gives this dystopia a feeling of nostalgia, like one of those languid Flake adverts from the late nineteen-seventies, a dystopia that looks idyllic.
I won’t spoil the many turns by revealing more, but Egan and co-writer Emma Lungiswa De Wet do a good job of keeping the story and its plot in sync as the stranger unravels the many truths of the family.
Darrin // Nightingale 