O, Glory!
2021 · 16m · United Kingdom
Directed by Joe Williams, Charlie Edwards-Moss
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
Set in the late 1970s, a psychiatric doctor and his assistant are called to an isolated country house to examine Deborah, whose brother believes she is losing her mind. Fuelled by hysteria and hallucinatory paranoia, they descend into abstract madness.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The period setting and psychiatric framing feel like they're *supposed* to lend gravitas, but the real move here is watching the film abandon logic entirely and drag us into pure hallucination—it's a slow-burn rejection of the thriller contract, and it mostly works because they commit to the weirdness rather than wink at it.
Williams and Edwards-Moss construct a deliberate descent into formal abstraction, each scene tightening the compositional noose until narrative coherence becomes irrelevant; the film knows exactly what it owes to psychological horror lineage and then systematically dismantles those conventions from within.
The decision to let the camera become as unreliable as Deborah's perception—treating distortion and spatial confusion as *editorial* choices rather than just VFX—is what separates this from other paranoia films; it's a small-budget film that understands that restraint in the early scenes makes the formal dissolution actually *mean* something.
Reviews
O, Glory! is a thrilling folk horror that pays homage to the iconic films of the 70s that founded the horror sub-genre whilst also ushering in the co-directors' modern sensibility to the formula. What then unfolds is a story of hysteria, hallucinatory paranoia and twists that keep you on your toes through a palpably tense atmosphere and genuine moments of terror.