Wes (Ryan Kwanten) jolts awake from a nightmare whilst driving on a quiet country backroad. Taking the sensible decision to pull over and try to rouse himself for the journey ahead, the exhausted forty-something parks his car at an isolated rest-stop, apparently ignorant of a whole cinematic history warning against this exact situation (see: Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes…) Seemingly in the midst of a messy breakup, Wes finds himself spending the night at the rest-stop, drinking whiskey as if it were water and burning his collection of romantic trinkets. Waking up from this post-girlfriend bender, our protagonist finds himself joined by an unnamed and unseen man (JK Simmons, in a solely vocal performance) whose commanding voice booms from the corner cubicle in the rest-stop toilet, a setting that Wes can’t seem to leave.
Mixing Lovecraftian horror with moments of juvenile comedy, Glorious (its title taken from the ominous ‘glory-hole’ that Wes uses to communicate with Simmons’ ominous presence) is a slim 80-minute sketch that arguably falls at the first hurdle by not being particularly scary or funny enough to justify its central conceit. Obviously designed around its low-budget and the elevating (but not quite film-saving) presence of Simmons, who delights in his role as a cosmic monstrosity, Glorious mostly distills down to a dialogue-driven two-hander between its central roles. There’s something captivating in its small-scale setup of a loner meeting a demonic entity on a desolate backroad, but the film’s uncertain sense of what exactly it wants to be, blending crude toilet-humour with a late-stage stab at socio-political commentary, results in a muddled piece that so clearly could have used one more re-write.
Notes from the Multiplex 