Glorious

If you had told me five years ago that the guy who played the lovable, dim-witted Jason Stackhouse in True Blood would eventually spend eighty minutes having a philosophical debate with an ancient, cosmic deity through a rest-stop glory hole, I probably would have asked for your dealer's number. Yet, here we are in the golden age of "high-concept, low-budget" streaming horror, and Rebekah McKendry’s Glorious is the exact kind of high-octane weirdness that makes me glad the mid-budget theatrical release is being replaced by these daring digital swings.

I watched this while trying to assemble a Swedish bookshelf in my living room, and honestly, the cosmic dread emanating from the screen was significantly less stressful than trying to figure out where those four extra cam-lock screws were supposed to go. It’s a film that demands your attention not through scale, but through sheer, grimy audacity.

The Voice in the Next Stall

The setup is deceptively simple, almost like a twisted stage play. Ryan Kwanten plays Wes, a man who is clearly spiraling after a breakup. He’s messy, he’s drunk, and he’s currently burning his possessions at a roadside rest stop. After a bout of morning-after sickness sends him sprinting into a public restroom—the kind that looks like it hasn't seen a bottle of bleach since the Carter administration—he finds himself locked in.

But he’s not alone. In the adjacent stall sits Ghat, voiced by the inimitable J.K. Simmons. Now, J.K. Simmons could read the nutritional facts on a box of Frosted Flakes and make it sound like a Shakespearean monologue, but here, he is doing something special. He is the voice of an eldritch god, a celestial entity that needs a favor from a very broken, very confused human.

Ryan Kwanten deserves a massive amount of credit here. Acting against a literal wall for the duration of a movie is a Herculean task, and he carries the physical toll of the film beautifully. He captures that specific brand of "modern male fragility" without making Wes entirely unsympathetic, even as we learn more about why he’s at this rest stop in the first place.

A Pandemic-Era Pocket Dimension

Released in 2022, Glorious is a fascinating specimen of contemporary "contained" cinema. We’ve seen a lot of movies born from the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic—limited casts, single locations, scripts that rely heavily on dialogue over action—but Rebekah McKendry (along with writers David Ian McKendry and Joshua Hull) uses these limitations as a creative springboard rather than a crutch.

The production design turns a dingy bathroom into a neon-soaked, Lovecraftian cathedral. The use of lighting—specifically those sickly pinks and purples—elevates the space from "gross" to "otherworldly." It’s a testament to the fact that you don't need a $200 million Marvel budget to create a sense of scale. Sometimes, all you need is a really good sound designer and a voice actor who knows how to rumble. It’s basically 'Locke' if Tom Hardy had to save the universe with his genitals.

The film taps into that very 2020s anxiety: the feeling of being trapped in a small space while the world outside (or, in this case, the entire universe) is seemingly falling apart. It’s cosmic horror that feels intensely personal. Ghat isn't just threatening the end of existence; he’s forcing Wes to look at the wreckage of his own life.

Beyond the Glory Hole

What I find most refreshing about Glorious is how it treats its central "gag." A glory hole in a horror movie usually signals a dive into the "splatter-porn" depths of the early 2000s, but this movie is surprisingly intellectual. It’s a literal "toilet humor" movie that’s smarter than most Oscar bait, blending gross-out gags with genuine mythological weight.

It feels right at home on Shudder, a platform that has become a sanctuary for these kinds of "oddity" films that wouldn't survive the meat-grinder of a traditional theatrical wide release. In an era where franchise fatigue is a very real condition, Glorious stands out because it doesn't want to build a "Cinematic Universe." It just wants to tell a tight, 79-minute story about a guy, a god, and a very unfortunate piece of plumbing.

The trivia behind the scenes is just as scrappy as the film itself. Because it was shot during the height of the pandemic, the crew had to be incredibly inventive. The "Ghat" mural on the stall wall, which becomes a focal point of the film’s mythology, was actually designed to be both ancient and modern, bridging the gap between street art and ancient hieroglyphs. It’s that level of detail that keeps the movie from feeling like a "one-joke" premise.

Ultimately, Glorious is a triumph of tone. It manages to be funny, disgusting, and weirdly moving all at once. While the ending might lean a bit too hard into the "cosmic CGI" tropes that it spent the first hour subverting, the journey there is unlike anything else released in the last few years. If you've ever felt like your life was a mess and the universe was out to get you, Wes is your guy—just maybe bring some hand sanitizer for the ride.