Writer-director-actress Grace Glowicki hasn’t yet ascended to the same level of indie prestige as Kate Lyn Sheil, Deragh Campbell, or (now mainstream power player) Greta Gerwig, but if there’s any justice in this world, she soon will. After co-starring in a number of low-budget, resolutely small-scale films, she’s now released her second directorial effort. Her debut, 2019’s Tito, was a disturbingly odd bit of provocation, a sorta-cringe comedy built entirely around Glowicki’s twitchy, nervous (and hilarious) lead performance. Her latest, Dead Lover, raises the bar in every way: it’s bigger, much broader, delightfully gross, and even funnier than her debut.
As the title might suggest, and an opening title card quoting Mary Shelley confirms, Dead Lover is a Frankenstein riff. Glowicki is a local gravedigger, desperate for love but rebuffed by all for her dirty clothes and pungent odor. She eventually meets a sailor (played by Glowicki’s real-life husband and frequent collaborator Ben Petrie) who is intoxicated by her scent, and they fall madly in love. But he is soon lost at sea, leaving behind only a single severed finger. Determined to bring back her beau, Glowicki embarks on a series of experiments to resurrect him. Eventually, she combines the dead lover’s finger with the corpse of a nobleman’s deceased wife. The experiment is only a partial success, and soon the widowed nobleman is made aware that his wife’s corpse has been reanimated. This brings him into conflict with the gravedigger, who is also distraught that her newly revived lover has lost interest in her.
This cursory plot summary doesn’t do justice to just how outright odd Dead Lover is; filmed in a deliberately artificial manner on obvious black box sound stages, the whole thing has a handmade, home-crafted feel to it — something like Hot Topic Jo-Ann Fabrics. Working with cinematographer Rhayne Vermette and shooting on 16mm film, Dead Lover evokes at various stages everything from Kenneth Anger to Universal Monster movies from the ‘30s to Guy Maddin to even the chintzy chiaroscuro of Albert Serra’s Liberté. There are puppets, fake plastic laboratory equipment, fog machines, and lots of red and green filters. Amusingly, this mixture of minimalism and artifice extends even to the naming of characters, where Glowicki is credited only as “gravedigger,” Petrie is simply “lover,” the nobleman, played by Lowen Morrow, is “widower,” and the wife’s corpse is merely “dead opera singer.”
It’s also a randy, pro-sex film, with each actor gleefully crossdressing and gender-swapping as they all take turns playing other small roles. The whole thing has a macabre theater-kid energy, blessed with a purity of desire to put on a show and make themselves laugh. The energy is infectious, as they say, and everyone is having a blast donning costumes, fake mustaches, and trying out funny accents with wild abandon. There’s some extremely funny slapstick embedded here, as well as plenty of absurdist sight gags (the gravedigger’s initial experiment only succeeds in making the severed finger several feet long, but conscious, and so she naturally, promptly, masturbates with it). It’s a lark of a film, a winning trifle that’s sure to become some sort of cult favorite for those quick to attune to its unique wavelength, and a must-watch for fans of DIY aesthetics and campy vamping.
Published as part of Overlook Film Fest 2025.
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