Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Rebekah McKendry
Starring: Ryan Kwanten, JK Simmons, Tordy Clark, Andre Lamar,
Sylvia Grace Crim
Director Rebekah McKendry's sophomore feature
Glorious certainly boasts a unique premise. Following what
appears to be the breakup of his relationship with his girlfriend Brenda
(Sylvia Grace Crim), our protagonist Wes (Ryan Kwanten)
finds himself falling asleep at the wheel, looking as though he's been
rode hard and put away wet. Pulling into a rest stop, he attempts to
call Brenda but smashes his phone after only getting through to her
voicemail. Finding a bottle of whiskey in his car, he sets about getting
smashed and burns all but one of his polaroids of Brenda. Waking with a
nasty hangover and no trousers the following morning, Wes heads into the
rest stop bathroom where he finds himself in a groggy conversation with
a voice (JK Simmons) emanating through the glory hole of his
stall. Discovering he's locked in the restroom, Wes begins to believe
the increasingly odd claims of the unseen voice, which purports to be a
cosmic entity seeking a favour from Wes in order to prevent the
destruction of the universe.
Yep, haven't heard that one before. So why does
Glorious feel so familiar? Perhaps it's because it shares
its theme and setup with two other recent horror movies. Another recent
Shudder release, Luke Boyce's
Revealer
has a similar premise of characters stuck in a scuzzy confined setting
during the apocalypse, in that case the peep show booth of a strip club,
and Glorious employs a similar aesthetic of purple neon
light, as though it's set in Prince's bathroom. But the movie
Glorious is most similar to is Travis Stevens' yet to be
released
A Wounded Fawn, which recently premiered at Tribeca. Like Glorious, that movie saw a man with a sinister past put on trial by cosmic
forces, and both movies see their leading man get increasingly deranged
and bedraggled, their bloodied blue shirts making them resemble Bruce
Campbell in Evil Dead 2.
Glorious is the most successful of the three, due in no
small part to the performances of its two central characters. Kwanten, a
Ryan Reynolds lookalike best know for his role in vampire TV show
True Blood, has a boyish charm that helps mask the sinister character he's
gradually revealed to be concealing. Simmons delivers a truly impressive
vocal performance, playing against his usual gruff self by portraying
his cosmic entity as something of a naïve child.
McKendry employs flashbacks to Wes's relationship with Brenda, in the
form of almost subliminal flashes and lengthier scenes. The latter serve
to disrupt the flow of the film and don't really tell us anything more
than the ideas put into our head by the briefer glimpses of this doomed
coupling. It's so obvious where this backstory is headed that it may
have been wiser to spill the beans earlier in the narrative.
While the dynamic between Wes and the unseen entity is initially witty,
it grows a little tiresome in the movie's second half when the film sets
about revealing its plot and becomes overly reliant on exposition. It
comes in at 80 minutes yet still feels like it could have told this
story more efficiently in the form of a short or an anthology
segment.
