Most of us can decide based on the one or two sentence synopses that we read whether you want to watch the film in question: Glorious caught my attention with something like (paraphrasing here) “a dude on the road with all his belongings in his car, stops at a rest area, where he gets locked inside the restroom with only the voice of an unseen demi-god (the sonorous pipes of the great J.K. Simmons) coming from the next stall over. He’s told that the fate of the universe is at stake and only he, the dude, can save it.
Okay, I am definitely in! Let’s do this!
Alas, and unfortunately for me, the film is a Lovecraftian tale (or an extended illusion of one) that takes place almost entirely in the aforementioned men’s room. The subtle humor and the twist that waits until the final ten minutes before rolling it out in a somewhat anti-climactic fashion kept me watching until the credits, but this is definitely going to be more for fans of the Lovecraft mythos and not so much the average modern Horror viewer.
Wes (Ryan Kwanten) has just gone through a messy breakup and has packed his stuff into a car and aimlessly set out for the next thing, whatever that is. After pulling off at the rest stop, he spends a long night getting super nasty drunk and wakes up the next morning face down in the parking lot in his boxers and shirt.
Realizing he needs to race into the bathroom as soon as possible, he finds himself inside a dirty stall that would make the bathroom at the old CBGBs look sparkling clean. But then he hears a voice saying howdy-doo from the next stall over and so begins a dialogue with only one of the participants visible.
The stall from which the demi-god’s voice emanates is painted in grotesque graffiti with what appears to be a glory hole (don’t worry – that part ends up being not as bad as you’d think) and he’s sternly warned against looking into it.
Here’s the problem – if you’re going to have a movie or play take place 90% in one small setting, the dialogue is really going to have to carry the load, and here, in spite of occasional touches of funny snark, the script is just not up to the task.
It was around the 50 minute mark where Wes finally asks the disembodied voice, “What do you want?” – a totally fair question, given that all the mumbo-jumbo (for non-Lovecraftian aficionados) has been far too elliptical to tell us enough information to keep us on the edge of our seats.
As I say, I kept watching, but it was mostly out of professional courtesy and a curiosity about how director Rebekah McKendry and her writers are going to tie this all up. I’ve said this before about many movies—this would have made a helluva 25 minute episode on an anthology series, but even at less than an hour and a half, it falls just short of the hopes I had when reading the synopsis.
Glorious is currently streaming on Shudder | 2 out of 4 stars | small bit of gore and sexuality