I Saw it on Shudder: Glorious

Not your mother's glory hole!

“I Saw it on Shudder” is a series where I write about my takes on random movies I’m watching on Shudder in informal essay form. Spoilers galore. For entertainment purposes only - not fully hashed out film criticism!

I feel like I should make a disclaimer about this review in that I’m kind of a huge fan of Rebekah McKendry, the director of Glorious. In particular, she is one of my favorite academics of horror! So naturally, I saw her movie when it debuted on Shudder. Also, since this film came out fairly recently (2022), I’m going to try and do considerably less spoilers, especially for the ending. I want you to watch and enjoy it! It’s also on Tubi, not just Shudder.
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When I first saw Glorious I was pretty neutral about it. I wasn’t blown away or underwhelmed. I thought it was pretty solid, and the characters were all engaging and fun to watch. I mean come on - J.K. Simmons as the cosmic god! A delight! It’s definitely light on terrifying horror, and heavy on the dark comedy and blood splatter. However, I recently revisited this movie because it was streaming live and I wanted to write down some of my thoughts.

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Glorious follows Wes, a man clearly heartbroken and running away from his problems. He pulls into a rest stop to burn the physical memories of a woman whom he loved but is no longer with. This includes a talking teddy bear, which comes up frequently later in the movie. In the bathroom, he communicates with a voice that is coming from a stall with an elaborately artistic glory hole. We learn fairly quickly that this voice is attached to an entity that is claiming to be a god, and he needs Wes to fulfill a major fate quest. The survival of the world is at stake. Can Wes, who’s already suffering immense heartache, step up and be the reluctant hero?

“What’s a guy like you doing in a rest stop bathroom like this?” - J.K. Simmons, probably.

To start off: the color scheme is my favorite. Favorite what? It’s my favorite. In fact, the color scheme for this movie is my studio lighting. My husband hates it, but it makes for excellent horror movie lighting! The unnatural pinks, reds, blues, and purples are so starkly different from the natural lighting outside, which gives the feeling of safety. I loved that occasional “breath of fresh air” as one could say, because the bathroom lighting just added to feeling trapped and hopeless (wait - is this what my husband feels in my studio?!). This all gives this film a very Lovecraftian feel, and the audience is left to wonder (many times and on many levels over): what is exactly real in this movie?

Okay but this color palette brings *me* comfort!

Without spoiling EVERYTHING: Wes, despite what we see, isn’t a great guy, it turns out.

In the past few years I’ve seen several movies with a similar theme to Glorious: movies about a deeply flawed character that is forced to confront their shortcomings and bad deeds, culminating in a climax where the protagonist, overcome with guilt and remorse, is absolved of their sins (usually in the way of death but not always). It tends to feel really hollow for me, because it always centers someone who should not be centered. With Wes, we build up to that moment, but it doesn’t quite come to that. And unlike a lot of the other films I’ve seen, we identify with Wes. We are rooting for him. We want him to get out. We have hope when a possible savior comes. We are torn at the end. We are thrown into his girlfriend’s perspective. Wes is also, for intents and purposes, is de-centered as well!

I’ve read a lot of criticisms describing the ending as a let down. I find this incredibly odd to be quite honest! It’s inherently designed to be a letdown, and for good reason. From the glory hole, to Wes, to the gods, to the fucking TITLE of the movie, we’ve been yanked around with our expectations. We’re forced to look at our own biases, to look at the ways in which we try and self preserve; not just physical, “I’m-just-trying-to-live” preservation but also our self-perception. The ending of the film felt deserved because of the lack of, dare I say, glory. Wes doesn’t deserve glory. Does anyone deserve glory? I’ll stop right there to avoid giving anything away.
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I’ve said before that I love expressions of memory on film, and this one is great at showing us how faulty it can be. Wes’s memory is not only used as escapism from his horrible situation and to avoid answering uncomfortable questions, but it’s used against him by the bathroom stall creature as punishment for disobeying looking at him (note that he warned him that he would become “hideous” to behold - interesting!). We only see his memories of his girlfriend (Brenda) in a couple of scenes. This might have been a technical constraint they had, but for the purposes of this review I’ll pretend it’s completely on purpose. We first meet her at an outdoor party, where she clearly wins him over with her banter and draws his attention away from a beautiful blonde woman. We also see her give him the bear, clearly the first time “love” is openly spoken between them. And finally, we see the moment of betrayal. The rest of Brenda’s appearances are hallucinations of various sorts - some revisionist fantasy (she’s on this road trip with him) and some creature terror (scenes in a black box room).

Star crossed lovers?

We can assume that their relationship, based on the flashback memories, wasn’t a long one, so why does Wes have such a dramatic reaction to its demise? Why is Brenda the one that got away? And most of all, why is there a disembodied Brenda voice asking, why things weren’t different because she was not like all the others? Sure, we do get more details on the event that ended the relationship, but even so, his reaction is outsized. His grief is deep. His memories of her are sparse. They are really of only two moments: meeting her, and the teddy bear gift. Did Wes block it all out? Perhaps the relationship was more one-sided than what we’re lead to believe? Was it ALL fantasy? Who knows! But the way we see it all play out should have made us more cautious into automatically aligning with Wes. And yet… it’s quite the opposite!

This brings me to my final observation: the woman at the rest stop at the beginning. She kind of provides a similar role as the “old man warning the kids of their impending doom out in the country” trope, except, instead of a warning, she seems to be waiting for him. She has a habit of balling up pieces of paper and lining them up on the table, and judging by the line she was waiting for him for a while. It kind of reminds me of movies where an assassin is waiting for their mark. When he struggles getting a chocolate bar out of a vending machine, she retrieves it for him. I can’t help but make the connection that he took candy from a stranger, a warning often used by parents to keep their kids safe. Once again, planting seeds of expectations of who is the bad guy, and who is the savior.

The woman then leaves, while giving a knowing, smug smile towards a weird (favorite color palette) plant. We never see her again. However, she is referenced again with a shot of the only other non flashback character, Gary, a maintenance man, who cleans up her line of crumpled paper. He does not clean up Wes’s mess at the fire pit, even though Gary notes it. It confirms her role as integral to the inescapable fate of Wes.

So how did I feel about the accidental rewatch? I really loved it! It is hard for me to find newer horror movies that I really enjoy watching over and over, but this is one of them. Wes is a truly engaging, charismatic character that is easy to feel for, and I enjoyed picking up more as his backstory is slowly revealed for the dramatically weird ending. I loved being constantly reminded, in many visual ways, how small and insignificant we all are. Wait - okay maybe not that part! 
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Watch Glorious on Shudder or Tubi for a moody, funny film with Lovecraft vibes!