I fear I did not enjoy Glorious. This is not the fault of the stars, crew or director (Rebekah McKendry, since I’m in the habit of naming directors for each film this year, yet this time it feels like I’m singling her out to blame; I’m not!).
This is entirely because of my OCD – specifically, contamination OCD. I am genuinely terrified of even minor things like sweat and dust. So why the fuck did I think I could handle a film set in a truck stop bathroom and whose name is a play on the term ‘glory hole’? This is entirely on me.
I will say that I have used rest stop loos before, but only in the UK (where I am presently) and in Europe (Belgium and Germany). I can’t drive, so my experiences are limited. But nothing could prepare me for how utterly revolting the bathroom is in this film. Are they just that much more disgusting in America?
So much of the horror in Glorious initially rests on just how willingly unhygienic the protagonist Wes (Ryan Kwanten) is. It quickly became too much for me. Soon, I didn’t give a fuck that he’s a shell of a man after a horrible (off-screen) break-up. He is a walking petri dish of filth from the second he shows up, wanting to grab a lone, probably-stale, no-name chocolate bar from an impossibly dusty roadside vending machine. He then drinks himself into a stupor and then wakes up to throw up in the loo (why? WHY do people throw up in the toilet? Do you not care about splashback? Why would you put your face so close to where someone shat??), which of course involves hugging every square inch of the most soiled toilet seat and basin I’ve ever fucking seen. He then wipes his face, mouth and eyes (why stop there? Why not finger your fucking ears, too, you foetid fuckface?) in relief, but a voice (JK Simmons) from the next stall tells him he needs his help with something…otherworldly.
As a chamber piece, Glorious starts to have a little more breathing room once Simmons’s character mercifully enacts some purple-red mood lighting (so that the filthy interior becomes less distracting), and conversations between the two open up, but the dialogue doesn’t match the ambitions that these would-be existential musings on humanity try to reach. I could see this working as a stage play or a short film but, even at a snippy 79 minutes, the film ends up bogged down by its tendency to wander in circles, and results in a movie that’s neither memorable nor tense. But it’s a competent addition to the cosmic horror genre, and I’m interested to see what the filmmakers do next.
Score: đđ
An Englishwoman in Salem 