In Glorious, Wes (Ryan Kwanten, True Blood) is on the road with a carload of memories, fresh off of a bad breakup. Pausing at a small, remote rest stop, Wes drinks his pain away in a night of lonesome cries and fevered voicemails.
Upon awakening – with a righteous hangover – Wes stumbles his way into the bathroom, leaving any sense of normalcy at the door. In that bathroom there is a glory hole, and in that glory hole there is… an ancient cosmic horror with daddy issues. Voiced by J.K. Simmons (Whiplash, Spider-Man), the demi-god has a favor to ask.
Rebekah McKendry (All the Creatures Were Stirring) directs this madcap premise with the appropriate combination of existential crisis, comedy, and blood.
McKendry’s genre resume is impressive. Filmmaking and producing aside, she was Fangoria’s Director of Marketing and Blumhouse.com’s Editor-in-Chief. She also hosts the Shock Waves and Killer POV podcasts, and is a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. 
The world is threatened by unimaginable horror, and its fate lies in the hands of a selfish, unstable man who just needed to vomit. As a cosmic-horror-meets-slapstick-comedy, Glorious is surprisingly economical in concept.
It’s effectively a 2-hander with one location, although really it’s Kwanten who does all the heavy lifting as Simmons is only present to lend his dulcet vocal tones.
Simmons is a curious yet fitting choice for this glory hole guest. With his extensive voice acting experience, he carries a certain earthly gravitas, yet can tune his tone to comply with the more cosmically curious or decidedly exasperated dialogue of a demi-god. I’m not sure whose voice I would imagine coming from the interdimensional side of a bathroom stall, but there’s something so… human about his voice that it kind of adds to the absurdity of it all. 
Kwanten – as the film’s main point of focus – has a lot to carry. With Simmons in the stall and only two other small appearances, we’re with him for the full length of the film. No breaks. He must carry our attention throughout, which is a lot to put on a guy in one sparse location. Wes is… kind of a dink, and – as we learn – far from a good guy. Kwanten plays him with vulnerability and a certain sense of exhausted desperation that is quite relatable, given the circumstances.
Written by David Ian McKendry, Joshua Hull and Todd Rigney, Glorious invites the audience to join in on some interesting (if not nihilistic) lines of thought. Is altruism secretly offered as a selfish act? What would you do to save the universe? What do you deserve? For a film about a Lovecraftian bathroom break, it’s surprisingly thoughtful.
While there are some meandering parts that suffer the pacing of a single-location extended dialogue, Glorious offers pockets of humor and goopy gore (and bisexual lighting) to keep the audience going.
Of all the horror films that have come out this year, Glorious has one of the most inventive concepts. It’s the well made and eccentrically clever kind of film that catches your attention. So why not step up to the ol’ glory hole and see what all the fuss is about.
4 eyes out of 5
Glorious is part of Fantasia International Film Festival’s 2022 lineup. You can check out the trailer and poster below. For more Fantasia 2022 content, click here to read our review of Megalomaniac.
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