THE GLASS HOUSE

If you’re over 17, producer Neal Moritz (Cruel Intentions, the I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legends movies) doesn’t make movies for you. His latest, The Glass House, pits a teen heroine against a world of adults who are sinister, unreliable, or clueless. Not that Ruby Baker (Leelee Sobieski) is so on the ball; it takes her most of the movie to figure out what really went on between her folks, who died in a car crash, and her creepy new adoptive parents, Terry and Erin Glass (Stellan Skarsgård and Diane Lane). Numerous Hamlet references excuse Ruby’s delay in taking decisive action against her own Claudius and Gertrude; they also give the movie an illusion of substance. The many symbols, ironies, and foreshadowings are as tidy, overstated, and transparent as the glass house that is the Glass house, a forbidding Malibu cliffside mansion that affords Ruby all the privacy of a fishbowl.

The filmmakers have clearly lavished less care on their storytelling than on this expensive set. Screenwriter Wesley Strick (Cape Fear, The Tie That Binds) has drained this well dry, and rookie feature director Daniel Sackheim has forgotten everything he learned about suspense, surprise, and subtlety from his work on The X-Files. The movie doesn’t even work on its own sub-Hitchcockian terms; not only is it full of gaping plot and logic holes, but its villains are too desperate and sloppy to be truly dangerous threats. Sobieski, who typically plays intelligent, sensitive outcasts (Never Been Kissed, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, Joan of Arc), looks as if she’d rather be off reading about J.D. Salinger’s Glass family. Still, teens who routinely lie to their parents and chafe at their supervision — and which teens don’t? — will probably cheer Ruby’s Oedipal adventure and not have too many stones to throw at The Glass House.

— Gary Susman