Glass official trailer reveal: An M. Night trilogy

Leading a career of extreme highs and incredible lows, M. Night Shyamalan looks to continue his recent renaissance with the comic-book inspired Glass, the long-awaited sequel to Unbreakable and Split.

Keeping a consistent filmography takes years, possibly even decades, of dedication, hard work, and a keen understanding of what the audience wants. A filmmaker essentially shares their vision with the audience to create a connection that can lead to a successful run at the box office, which, if one plays their cards right, can lead to a higher chance of their personal passion projects being more easily funded. It’s all down to connecting with the audience, something which writer-director, M. Night Shyamalan, has had trouble doing for the past 15 years.

M. Night Shyamalan, best known for his work with the terrific drama-thriller, The Sixth Sense, as well as his gritty take on the superhero genre, Unbreakable, has since led a polarizing and turbulent career that’s brought out some of his most negatively-reviewed work to date, such as the environmental horror film, The Happening, his take on The Last Airbender and the massive bomb that is the Smith-led sci-fi action drama, After Earth.

Before Glass was even announced, Shyamalan had become a director that not a lot of people really knew how to categorize, considering his versatile filmography. However, once he released The Visit, a low-budget found-footage style horror film, it became clear that M. Night seemed to be most at home when exploring macabre content, which was further solidified with his tense kidnapping thriller, Split, which many saw as his return to form.

Now, he is building upon the shared universe of Unbreakable and Split with his ambitious comic-book style superhero thriller, Glass.

18 years in the making

The trailer for Glass starts out rather coldly, as the trailer immediately hard cuts to Dr. Ellie Staple (played by the one and only Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist remarking on how amazing it feels to meet whomever she’s meeting. The trailer shows that the people she’s meeting are the three extraordinary leads for the film: David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), returning from Unbreakable, and Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the multiple-personality serial killer from last year’s Split, whom start the trailer in a type of institution, uncomfortably close to one another.

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The trailer, in many ways a teaser, is vague about what is to happen, but Glass points to a drastically different tone from both Unbreakable and Split. There are instances of scenes set in the institution itself and multiple scenes on the outside, including shots of S.W.A.T. members being overwhelmed by something and an unnerving shot of Crumb running dangerously fast on all fours out in the open.

This is all mixed with Jackson’s Mr. Glass staying relatively silent throughout all of this, presumably planning something sinister on his own time.

Glass is not only promising to be an engaging superhero drama-thriller, but it’s building up to be M. Night Shyamalan’s most ambitious film to date. Tying together the narratives from two drastically different films set over 17 years apart can cause much audience confusion if not pulled off well. Even with the ending of Split revealing Willis’ David Dunn casually hanging out in a diner, there was still people who didn’t quite understand what the connection was. There still may be that air when Glass comes out, so it remains to be seen how M. Night will pull off this gutsy film.

But as of now, Glass not only served as one of the highlights of this year’s SDCC, it has also skyrocketed itself to being one of the most highly anticipated films of 2019, with the trailer having well over 2 million views on YouTube with not even a day of it being online. Glass, if pulled off right, can serve as a benchmark for how to do spin-offs and sequels correctly without so much overlap. While the MCU is essentially a giant mini-series at this point in its life, M. Night’s strange superhero trilogy serves as an example of patient filmmaking, hopefully with amazing results.

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Glass is set to be released in theaters on January 18, 2019.