DEAD LOVER: Mary Shelley Would Approve

What do you get when you toss Mel Brooks, a Nine Inch Nails music video, early SNL, German Expressionism, cartoons, community theater, your friends’ dreams, and an improbably long finger puppet into an open grave to fester? Why, Grace Glowicki’s deliriously creative, fabulously raunchy sophomore feature, Dead Lover, of course! This fully DIY production, which played at Sundance this month, was a labor of love undertaken as a work of “completely unstructured free association” between the four members of the cast. Written over the course of a month (at least, what Glowicki called the “diarrhea draft” was), the script is a Rabelaisian mashup of Frankenstein tales like Poor Things and Frankenhooker, as well as hints of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume and a healthy dose of gothic erotica of the most sordid variety: a terminally stinky gravedigger with a penchant for concocting potions and monologuing to the moon (Grace Glowicki) is, simply put, desperately horny. Convinced no one will ever sleep with her because of her smell, she’s astonished when, one day at a funeral, she meets a particularly adventurous libertine named Swimmer (Ben Petrie) who finds her funk fascinating (remember that old saw about Mary Shelley losing her virginity in a graveyard?). Depraved courtship ensues. After Swimmer dies at sea leaving only a finger behind, though, the enterprising gravedigger goes full mad scientist, working to regrow her lover from this single digit–– to madcap, murderous, body swapping results. Adorable glow in the dark lizards are eviscerated, copious opium is smoked, and bisexual zombie sex abounds. Often, characters will burst into rhyme. 

source: Cartuna

Dead Lover is a cartoon lightning bolt of vivacious, zany good fun and open experimentalism held together by the obvious talent and affection of its cast and crew, largely pulled from community theater. The film was shot on 16mm by Rhayne Vermette, a self-described “experimental punk from Winnipeg,” and if this moniker reminds you of experimental filmmaker and Winnipeg-native Guy Maddin, it should! The visual palette of this movie, with its hyper-artificial settings all shot in a tiny black box theater using plastic swimming pools and “dollar store lights” to evoke ‘30s cinematography, has Maddin’s sticky fingerprints all over it. The mise-en-scène is undeniably delicious, like if an undead teenage Petra Collins had access to an entire Spirit Halloween, or if FW Murnau tried to remake Lisa Frankenstein. The music is equally eclectic, combining crackling organ tunes, opera, and an original art pop score by U.S. Girls. 

Grace Glowicki, who starred in another horror comedy, Booger, last year, is a torrential comic presence, layering a twitchy, maximalist physical performance heaping with vaudevillian snark over an unironically sweet performance. “If things are just camp or just funny or just silly, I just don’t care. So, it was really important… to understand the emotional core of things,” she told Screen Rant. The other performers (Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow round out the tiny cast) match her tone and energy with aplomb, likely in part due to their unorthodox collaborative development process: each performer played every part for half of the 6 weeks of rehearsal before settling on a handful of roles a piece. 

Of course, a crazy quilt horror comedy like Dead Lover is likely not to everyone’s taste, but for lovers of spooky vibes, general pantagruelism, or sentient phallic puppets, this film’s playful, undead spirit is contagious, and obviously deeply felt by its creative team of Dr. Frankensteins. “Practical horror/comedy has got its teeth in me,” Glowicki admitted to Bloody Disgusting. “When I start to engage more with fans of that cinema, I’m just struck by how free, fun, and dirty it is, and it’s such a joy in that kind of a movie.” Don’t mind the smell, Dead Lover is worth getting your hands dirty for.