The Glass House

The Glass House is a 2001 American psychological mystery thriller film directed by Daniel Sackheim and written by Wesley Strick. The film stars Leelee Sobieski, Diane Lane, Stellan Skarsgård, and Bruce Dern with supporting roles by Kathy Baker, Trevor Morgan, and Chris Noth. It tells the story of two siblings who go to live with friends of their parents as the oldest of the siblings starts to get suspicious of the family friends' patriarch. The film received generally negative reviews and was a box office bomb, grossing only $23 million on a $30 million production budget. The main reason cited for the financial failure of the film was that the film was released 3 days after the September 11 attacks. Plot Sixteen-year-old Ruby Baker and her eleven-year-old brother Rhett lose their parents, David and Grace, in a car accident. Their will is not recent but per its terms, the children are placed under the guardianship of family friends and former neighbors, the childless couple Dr. Erin Glass and Terry Glass. Erin is a respected physician and Terry runs a high-end car dealership, they now live in a large glass house in Malibu. From early on, all is not well. Citing short notice, the children have to share a room and are transferred from private to public school mid-year. The Glasses buy Rhett both a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation, and he is allowed to play them at all hours. Ruby is uncomfortable with Terry's sexual hints and reckless driving when they are alone. Ruby later finds unlabeled pharmaceuticals and sees Erin injecting herself, though Erin claims it is for diabetes. Ruby tries to get the children's estate and trust fund lawyer Alvin Begleiter to accept her concerns, but he is skeptical of her claims, as she was going through a rebellious phase prior to her parents' deaths, ultimately being suspended from school for plagiarism. Ruby pushes Begleiter to get social services involved, but visiting social worker Nancy Ryan is taken in by the couple's assurances.