'Glass' Spoilers, Ending Explained: Let's Talk About That Shyamalan Twist
It wouldn’t be an M. Night Shyamalan movie without a big twist ending, and Glass delivers on that tradition — sort of. The movie does have a twist (three, actually), but none of them are likely to blow your mind the way the director did when he revealed that the dude in that hairpiece the whole time? That’s Bruce Willis Bruce Willis was actually dead all along in The Sixth Sense.
All jokes aside, we’re here to talk about the Shyamalan twist(s) in Glass so let’s get into it. Warning: Spoilers for the end of Glass ahead.
Twist #1: The Horde’s True Origin Story
We learn in Split that James McAvoy’s character, Kevin Wendell Crumb, developed an intense multiple personality disorder and became “The Horde” after his father disappeared (something about taking a train) and his physically abusive mother scarred him for life. However, it’s never been clear exactly what happened to Kevin’s dad — until now.
As we learn during the climactic final fight in Glass, Kevin’s father was actually on the same train as David Dunn (Bruce Willis) in Unbreakable. You know, the one that Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) purposefully derails, killing everyone except Dunn. The accident causes David to realize he has superpowers, but as we learn in Glass, Elijah actually created two super-powered humans that day, it just took a while for the second one, The Horde, to reach its full potential.
Twist #2 Mr. Glass’ Secret Plan
When Elijah Price (or, as he calls himself, Mr. Glass) schemes to escape from the mental institution where he’s been locked up for decades, he tells both The Horde and David Dunn that he wants to see them fight at the grand opening of Philadelphia’s tallest tower so the world can finally learn that superheroes are real. However, it turns out that was never his actual goal.
Instead, the two end up fighting on the lawn right in front of the asylum, but that doesn’t mean his message won’t get out to the world. Earlier in the movie, cameras are installed all over the asylum as a security measure, and it turns out that Mr. Glass somehow managed to hack into that system and send video of the fight to a secret server. Then, after all three main characters die (more on that in a second), the video is uploaded to the internet where it quickly spreads.
The tower was always a distraction. In the age of smartphones, all you need is a few cameras and an internet connection to go viral.
Twist #3 Sarah Paulson’s Mysterious Secret Organization
What’s the deal with Sarah Paulson’s character in Glass? First, it seems like she’s a psychologist focused entirely on curing people who think they’re superheroes (which, weird, but ok). There’s a particularly great scene where she attempts to explain David Dunn’s supernatural ability to identify criminals as simple intuition. And it almost works.
But at the end of the movie, we learn that she’s actually part of a secret society devoted to suppressing super-powered humans by any means necessary. Their best option is to simply convince those people they’re crazy, but when that doesn’t work the next step is murder. That’s why the “cops” inexplicably kill everyone at the end of Glass.
It’s unclear exactly how long this organization has been around or what they plan to do next. That’s certainly something we’d enjoy seeing explored in a future sequel, though for the moment it seems pretty clear that M. Night Shyamalan is officially done with the trilogy he kicked off almost two decades ago.
Glass is in theaters now.
