The locked room of "Glorious" is a men's room at a rundown rest stop somewhere on the side of a lonesome highway. Wes (Ryan Kwanten) is driving down that particular highway after a rough breakup, his car stuffed with possessions, his mind crawling with thoughts of how and where everything went wrong for him. The rest stop seems like the perfect place to take a little pause, maybe have a drink or two, and try and recover a little of what he lost.
But one drink turns into more-or-less a whole bottle, and by the next morning, a hungover Wes is sprinting for the men's room. But this isn't just any men's room. Something's lurking in the stall next door, its energy radiating out from what looks like a glory hole in the wall, something that claims to be a god (voiced by J.K. Simmons), and further claims that if the world is going to survive the days to come, it needs Wes' help. Is this his chance to fix everything he did wrong, or is he about to become a pointless sacrifice in a cosmic game older than time itself?
The meat of "Glorious" is, as the trailer suggests, the conversations between Wes and the god, which begin with Wes simply not believing what he's experiencing while the god explains, in Simmons' soothing tones, what's really going on here. This could have been an exercise in pure, plodding exposition, or a rote checklist of various logical concerns viewers themselves might have as they watch the film. But the script, by Joshua Hull and David Ian McKendry, never lets these conversations grow stale. Sometimes the staleness is avoided by Wes attempting excursions out of the magically locked bathroom, but the refreshing quality of these scenes largely comes through in the dialogue, which feels real despite the surreal nature of the conversations. There's a really precise, well-considered merging of the gritty and the profound in the words, and it helps the whole film land better, particularly in the first act as things get established.
That same blend of gritty and profound is also evident from the very beginning in the film's visual style. McKendry, who rose to prominence as a horror academic and commentator before making features herself, is a lifelong student of horror imagery, and that means that "Glorious" is dripping with well-realized shots. Whether we see a strange, primordial writhing of something just under the stall wall or we're just looking at a sick man crouched beside a toilet, there's a real depth of vocabulary that McKendry brings to the framing, pacing, and general character of each scene, and that makes "Glorious" compelling even in its most grounded moments.
