Set in a cantilevered glass holiday let called the Lantern House above Loch Torridon, this piercing family drama asks what we owe one another when our tools remember more than we do. On the night they arrive, the Keir family's safety-assist EV, set to "guardian" mode for their anxious seventeen-year-old, Isla, brakes too late on the A896 as a delivery drone drops a crate onto the verge, sending a kayaks-strapped roof rack skittering into the path of a touring motorbike. Callum, a secondary-school history teacher, takes the wheel a heartbeat too late; Niamh, a cognitive systems researcher who helped design the very predictive models under the car's hood, is in the back seat editing a grant. Ten-year-old twins Rua and Finn are streaming a game. No one is killed, but a rider shatters a collarbone, and the car's crash-log contradicts human memory in a way that implicates them all.
For a week in the Lantern House's transparent rooms, while a routine inquiry by Sergeant Eilidh MacKay of Police Scotland gathers momentum, glass fractures into fault-lines. Callum sets up a makeshift classroom to steady the twins and begins quietly deleting incriminating browser tabs. Isla, nursing a wrist and a secret hack that nullified the car's lane-keeping to impress a friend, becomes entangled with Gabriel Vale, whose billionaire father, Soren Vale, appears unannounced in a helicopter to "check on the neighbors." Niamh's slow, off-kilter movements and sudden nostalgia for an abandoned project—Mnemo, a lifelogging headset that auto-summarizes days into shareable clips—hint at a deeper betrayal: her grant reviewer was Soren, and her code may already be inside his company's ubiquitous home assistant along the glen.
While drone deliveries buzz the loch and chatbots smooth-torque every conversation, the Keirs spar over what truth to submit: the car's black box, a helmet cam, Mnemo's montage, or their own flawed recollections. As Gabriel draws Isla toward the helipad and a future of curated selfhood, choices harden. What starts as an apology visit becomes a negotiation over data, reputation, and care, culminating on a storm-lashed night when the Lantern House sheds its power and turns from aquarium to mirror. Glass Houses of Memory is a propulsive meditation on culpability in a Scotland of sensors and ghosts, and on the impossible task of being good when your past can be replayed, edited, and sold.
