The movie was directed by the TV veteran Daniel Sackheim, who worked on "ER," "The X-Files," "Law & Order," and other series that are smarter than this. It stars Leelee Sobieski, one of the best young actresses, as Ruby Baker, who with her little brother, Rhett (Trevor Morgan), is orphaned when their parents die in a car crash. The family lawyer (Bruce Dern) explains that the parents had arranged for their close friends Erin and Terry Glass to be their guardians in the case of tragedy, and soon the kids are moving into the Glasses' big glass house (uh huh), which is luxurious, although Ruby and Rhett are a little too old to be sharing the same bedroom. It's a detail like that we find annoying. Why would the Glasses, who have acres of living space on their Malibu hilltop, put the kids into one room? Given the Glasses' long-term plans, why not make the kids as happy as possible? There's a kind of thriller in which the events unfold as they might in real life, and we have to decide which way to take them--and another kind of thriller, this kind, where the events unfold as a series of ominous portents, real and false alarms, and music stingers on the soundtrack. The first kind of thriller is a film, the second is a technical exercise.
What makes "The Glass House" sad is that resources have been wasted. Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgard, as the Glasses, are so good in the dialed-down "realistic scenes" that we cringe when they have to go over the top and make everything so very absolutely clear for the slow learners in the audience. Sobieski is fine, too--as good an upscale Los Angeles high school student as Kirsten Dunst in the recent "Crazy/Beautiful," but in a genre exercise that strands her instead of going someplace interesting and taking her along.
It's good to see Bruce Dern again. He's one of those actors, like Christopher Walken, who you assume on first glance has a secret evil agenda. Here he's the family lawyer who the kids can or can't trust, and is wise enough to play the character absolutely straight, with no tics or twitches, so that he keeps us wondering--or would, if Wesley Strick's screenplay wasn't one of those infuriating constructions where the key outside characters turn up at the wrong times, believe the wrong people and misinterpret everything.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55ll6GutL%2BMoaauq5Vif3F8kA%3D%3D