South Africian writer and director Kelsey Egan has crafted a tense and confounding thriller that will have you questioning your own memories and sanity by the end. In her debut feature film, Egan sets the stage of a post apocalyptic world where the air is now poisonous to almost everything. This toxin called The Shred causes humans to lose their memories, the more you are exposed to The Shred, the worse it is. What we understand of the outside world is minimal, but this pandemic (as timely pointed out on a magazine cover early in the film lists off three real ones MERS, SARS and Covid-19 before listing two fictional ones in Crobe and The Shred with the headline “Can we survive? The age of pandemics”) has ravaged the world, humanity is next to extinct, other than people with no memories roaming about with no impulse control and wildlife is even worse off, with most animals not being around for at least a generation.
In this hazy world, hides a utopia. A greenhouse on a patch of fertile land where a mother and her four children live (three daughters and a son). They plant vegetables to maintain sustenance, grow trees for oxygen and shoot any trespassers that come on the property if they don’t know the password to signal the return of their long lost eldest brother. In this little cocoon of a life, the family has developed rituals, partly to ensure they always trust each other by repeating their ethos and partly to assure themselves that they are also not losing their memories due to The Shred.
One day, eldest sister Bee (Jessica Alexander) does not shoot a wounded man when on sentry duty and brings him into their home, upsetting the delicate ecosystem the family has in place. What happens next is a toss up as The Stranger (Hilton Pelser) is either gaslighting the family into letting him stay, or they wonder if he is an infected person who at any time can lose all humanity and will power which could kill them. The film constantly toys with the truth, what we see isn’t always what we are told, and what we are told may come from unreliable narrators for very different reasons. The Mother (Adrienne Pearce) may seem to be losing her iron grip on the family, but she never seems to lose her cool as she is also plotting on how to use The Stranger to her advantage in keeping her family safe.
The film takes elements from several different subgenres of horror, including folk horror (using rituals and sacrifices to keep the family safe), body horror (they practice their sewing skills on the injured man and debone trespassers), psychological horror (everyone eventually starts to pit themselves against one another as you can no longer trust neither your own or others memories), monsters (the toxin’s turn people into memoryless beasts that are no longer considered human, becoming zombie-like) and more. Egan carefully weaves everything together with a gothic sensibility that never seems to overplay its hand and lands more on melodramatic tinges rather than the straight up horror that the themes would suggest. The film really hinges on sisters Bee and Evie (Anja Taljaard) having an incredible bond that is slowly tested to their limits.
The set design is especially inspired, as we have a large beautiful greenhouse as the only set, with custom stained glass windows to represent the family. Inside and out it is overflowing with flora, while the interior of the home is filled with candlesticks and antique furnishings. Other than the glossy magazine at the beginning of the film, this story could be timeless. Tales of pandemics, while very of the moment, are nothing new. There is no modern clothing, no technology (working or otherwise) and no gear to suggest a nice hardware store was robbed for supplies. Everything is functional and lived in, to the film’s great benefit. Egan and co-writer Emma Lungiswa De Wet have formulated an intimate gothic thriller for the “new normal” times.
Glasshouse was seen during the 2021 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to the festival for the screener. Glasshouse does not have a North American release date at this time.
Egan very graciously took some time to speak with Dakota and I over on Contra Zoom Pod, check out our interview with her (and Dakota s interview with the directors of had its world premiere at Fantasia Fest 2021 on August 16 with an additional screening on August 18.