‘Glorious’ Is A Fun Weird Horror Outing with a Wonderfully Unhinged Central Performance

If you’re heartbroken, hungover, or drowning in self-hatred, it doesn’t matter… never converse with a voice in the adjacent stall of a truck stop bathroom. It’s a lesson that heartbroken traveler Wes discovers the hard way in director Rebecca McKendry’s Glorious, recently premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival. The film is an imaginative, one-location horror outing that’s more high-concept than high-spectacle, but great central performances and surprises give it just enough variety to elevate it beyond its meager setting. It’s a solid horror entry worth any horror fan’s time.

Wes (Ryan Kwanten) is feverishly driving down the road in a vehicle full of stuff—artifacts of the life he came from. We don’t know the details, but it’s clear he’s an emotional wreck. Stopping at a roadside rest stop, Wes gets right-and-proper wasted, burning all the artifacts his car contained while occasionally stopping to leave desperate messages on the voicemail of a woman we can assume to be an ex. The next morning, Wes wakes up and uses one of the rest stop’s bathroom stalls—it’s an odd one, adorned with artwork of an unspeakable beast surrounding a glory hole (a classy, classy rest stop), but the hungover Wes pays no mind. From the adjacent stall comes an authoritative voice (J.K. Simmons), one that knows a little too much, that’s a little bossy, that speaks in mysteries.

It’s a simple premise and a simple setting—Wes spends the majority of the film in the bathroom—but one that hides a much wider set of universal forces at play. It turns out that the voice in the next stall is that of something dangerous and older than human comprehension, and it has demands of the hungover, heartbroken human. As the story unfolds there are welcome surprises and added complexities that land this securely in the terrain of more otherworldly horror outings. The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of it all remain a mystery until the end, but one that finely wraps together at the end and that’s sure to satisfy many a horror fan.

Kwanten is great here, giving the frenzied and complex performance of a man in circumstances he can’t quite comprehend before being asked to accomplish the impossible. Simmons, basically a voice here as his ‘true form’ cannot be gazed upon, gives a solid but relatively one-note vocal performance. The blame for this isn’t on Simmons here, who is characteristically excellent, but threatening undertones, odd speech, and similar subtle changes would have added a welcome otherworldliness while a number of classic techniques could have hidden the naturally warm undertones of Simmons’ voice and made them more alien, threatening, and complex.

Glorious could have easily gone south in a number of ways. It’s admirable that the film boldly takes place in a truck stop bathroom and, for the majority of its runtime, doesn’t leave that most uncinematic of spaces. That said, it does start to feel small as a conversationally-driven, one location film, feeling much like a play of some kind instead of the newest horror at a cineplex. This is something that could be easily addressed to some degree with subtle cinematography techniques and cheap effects to make things a little more off-kilter, and those changes would be welcome. On balance, however, there are just enough surprises, new blood, and variation to make it feel a little larger than its location may otherwise seem. McKendry also makes a wise choice to give audiences a slight peek behind the metaphysical curtain to really land the stakes and make this something other than a very long table read (but in a bathroom).

Glorious is a fun, high-concept exercise in cinematic weird fiction. It boasts an interesting moral stinger at the end, some intriguing twists, and a great central performance by Kwanten (who boldly swings for the fences). The film would be well served by subtle, relatively inexpensive changes that could make it a little more unsettling, put the audience more ill-at-ease, and suggest that there is a little more at play here than a voice in a stall, but it does just enough to leave a positive mark in the horror canon. It’s a very good low budget feature that’s a stone’s throw from being great, but it’s fully worth any filmgoer’s time.

Glorious premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival, and heads to horror streaming service Shudder on August 18th.