The Glass Man
Never has freshly squeezed orange juice signified such foreboding.
Plot summary
The story of a middle class man whose desperate weathering of the current economic crisis ends with the arrival one night of a debt collector with an offer that surely cannot be turned down.
Martin Pyrite (Andy Nyman) is having a really bad day. Not only is he desperately trying to prevent his wife (Neve Campbell) from finding out he has been fired, he is given a terrible reference and ordered out of the office forever, realises the true severity of his financial difficulties and is quietly mugged in broad daylight – all before the mysterious debt collector Pecco (James Cosmo) arrives on his doorstep with a proposition.
Nyman gives a heart-wrenching performance as a man on the edge, and writer/director Cristian Solimeno (who makes an appearance as Martin’s childhood friend turned famous actor) keeps the pressure on, never once offering Martin relief from his crushing and at times unbearable predicament. Cosmo is terrifying and hilarious in equal measure as an unpredictable gangster who seemingly has no limits. Campbell is an unusual choice for a quintessential English wife but does well with the accent and is wonderfully brittle and in an emotionally ramped up scene with her on-screen husband.
The Glass Man carefully treads the line between humour and tragedy, a finely tuned horror set in a seemingly unthreatening middle-class environment. Never has freshly squeezed orange juice signified such foreboding.
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