Glorious (2022)

Glorious takes the most unpromising setting imaginable—a grimy roadside bathroom—and turns it into a clever, claustrophobic pressure cooker where cosmic horror, pitch-black comedy, and genuine human sadness collide. Rebekah McKendry directs with a sharp eye for mood and momentum, wringing escalating dread (and some wince-worthy laughs) out of tight spaces, while Ryan Kwanten sells every ounce of panic and regret as a man forced to talk his way through the worst night of his life. Then there’s J.K. Simmons, whose voice performance is so confidently strange and oddly charismatic that a conversation through a stall wall becomes the movie’s secret weapon. It’s gleefully nasty and profane with bursts of brutal gore, so it won’t be for everyone—but if you like your horror imaginative, talky, and uncomfortably funny, this one is a small, nasty gem.

Glorious is clearly aiming for a scrappy, single-location Lovecraft-ish horror-comedy where a broken guy talks himself into (or out of) cosmic doom, and the restroom setting is a knowingly trashy hook. The problem is the novelty wears off fast: it leans hard on the premise and a lot of stall-to-stall dialogue, so if you need strong character work or escalating set pieces, it can feel thin and oddly stretched even at its short runtime. The gore is punchy when it shows up and J.K. Simmons’ voice work gives the “entity” real presence, but the emotional payoff may not land if you don’t buy into Wes as more than a bundle of guilt and bad decisions. If you like weird, talky, high-concept B-movie horror with crude humor and sudden brutality, you’ll probably have fun; if you want deep scares, rich mythology, or a satisfying twist-driven finale, you may leave annoyed rather than impressed.