AVClub: Movies that explore the relationship between a mother and her adult son are rare, which is one reason why last year’s James White, about a screwed-up young man struggling to care for his terminally ill mom, was so unusually affecting. Hailing from Ireland, Glassland represents another, far less successful effort in a similar vein. This time, Mom is a raging alcoholic rather than a cancer victim, but that works fine; the two provide equal opportunities for a great actor (Cynthia Nixon in James White, Toni Collette in Glassland) to perform arresting arias of anger and self-pity. No, the problem lies in writer-director Gerard Barrett’s conception of the son, who—decidedly unlike James White—has no real problems of his own and is merely doing the best he can with the lousy hand that life has dealt him. Glassland’s title is unexplained and somewhat cryptic (presumably, it’s meant to suggest extreme fragility), but there’s a reason why Barrett didn’t name the film after his protagonist: The guy’s sole function is to be an emotional punching bag.
We Got This Covered
Unlike its canned description, this isn’t a crime drama about a guy who threatens his own life to earn the money to help out his mom; it’s simply a familial drama with all of the necessary dysfunctional characters. That’s a low-key hook that mostly plays right into Glassland‘s unshowy execution, which is just unnerving enough to overwhelm someone with a personal connection to these issues. For a movie shooting for quotidian realism, the fact that it warrants a trigger warning might be the highest praise I could give.
