Glorious (2022)

After breaking up with his seemingly perfect girlfriend, a broken-hearted man, Wes (True Blood's Ryan Kwanten) is driving across country and realises he needs to stop before tiredness causes him to have an accident.

Pulling into a remote woodland, roadside, rest stop, he rages, drinks, destroys mementos from his past, and eventually finds himself locked inside the isolated bathroom.

Just to make his problems worse, there's a voice coming from the other toilet stall that claims to be an elder demigod, Ghat (voiced by JK Simmons), who needs a favour from Wes to prevent his father, an all-powerful cosmic creator god, from annihilating mankind.

Despite moments of broad dark comedy, Glorious is an incredibly tight piece of cosmic horror, tapping into Lovecraftian tropes by way of Michael Shea.

Penned by Joshua Hull, David Ian McKendry, and Todd Rigney, and directed by Rebekah McKendry, who has also directed the Elevator Game, Glorious is a delightfully grotty, unnerving, creepy horror that plays with expectations and makes great use of its limited cast and single main location.

The film is very self-contained and claustrophobic, for the most part a two-hander between Kwanten and Simmons' voice, with occasional appearances from the memory of Wes's girlfriend, Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim), that could almost be a stage play if not for the moments of over the top special effects and gore.

It's certainly one of the best attempts I've seen to modernise the spirit of Lovecraft, putting it on a par with The Void, mixed with elements of Color Out Of Space and Evil Dead, and within touching distance of John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness.

The pared-to-the-bone presentation means you can't really discuss much about the plot of Glorious without lurching headlong into verboten spoiler territory, but if you've read many of my reviews and think our tastes might gel then you'll probably love Glorious as much as I did.

Breadcrumbs leading to personal revelations about Wes are sown throughout the script, so you need to pay attention not just to what is being said, but the context.

While some of the sexual allusions might not have sat well with old starchy-pants Howard Phillips Lovecraft I reckon he would have liked the story of Glorious anyway for its combination of grim horror and wit.

I can understand why some might be underwhelmed, or even disappointed, by the ending but for me it was narratively and emotionally perfect, emulating the bleak spirit of many Lovecraftian horror tales.