A lonely gravedigger, who stinks of corpses, finally meets her dream man – but their romance is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, the gravedigger goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.
Directed by Grace Glowicki and written by Glowicki and Ben Petrie, the film stars Glowicki, Petrie, Leah Doz, and Lowen Morrow, each portraying multiple characters. The film is a community theatre project turned film idea, brought to life by Petrie and Glowicki and rehearsed in just over six weeks, with the final actors only given their roles three weeks before production. Dead Lover screened at SXSW, Night Visions, TIFF, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Soho Horror Festival after its world premiere at Sundance. It also proudly boasts screenings in STINK-O-VISION!, where viewers in theatres can scratch off numbered scent cards to ‘enjoy’ the awful aromas in real time. I was sadly too far away to receive one of these wonderful accompaniments and had to—unfortunately—make do with my vivid imagination.
Dead Lover will undoubtedly be met with mixed reviews. It watches more like a play than it does a film production and is intentionally campy and allegorical. It is raw, crass, and unapologetically sexual in nature, which is going to make certain demographics clutch their pearls. The acting is also very stage and not screen, meaning it is absolutely over the top, exceptionally dramatic, and preferably viewed with a glass of wine rather than a bucket of popcorn. The film defies all the norms of a screen production and instead opts for what are clearly stage props and effects, lighting, and sound. It is, for all intents and purposes, a raunchy, funny, and slapstick love letter to the theatre. It is barely a movie. And as someone who was once a theatre kid, I adored it.
As with traditional stage productions, this is more tragicomic than it is a horror film; our protagonist loses their lover only to bring them back in the most ridiculous, Frankensteinian way. Every choice seems to only make everything worse as the Dead Lover’s insatiable libido causes chaos throughout the film’s runtime. While unarguably tragic, the film’s overall tone is definitely more comedic, bordering on absurd. With the cast portraying multiple characters, things can occasionally also feel a touch confusing as our brains need a second to parse who’s who doing what to whom.
It’s hard to separate the theme and the tale as there are clear nods to obsession, stalking, the romanticism of morbidity and death, the hypocrisy of the clergy, and, of course, rape. It’s a whole bag of bad things, wrapped up and stuffed into a coffin. But it’s exactly that fearless leap into the morbid and the extreme that makes the film as fun as it is. It shies away from nothing as it pays homage to the great and goofy stories of early English theatre, which were far more crude and crass than your English teachers ever dared let on.
One cannot go into this film expecting…well…a film. What you are going to witness is an experimental blend of stage and screen, with all caution thrown to the wind and all the child-friendly filters strewn to the side. Dead Lover is the unwashed, unwanted lovechild of Shakespearean smut and Mary Shelly’s machinations. It is a deranged and hilarious cavalcade of corpses, cadavers, and cum.
Thanks for reading, and as always, stay sordid. Dead Lover will be available in UK cinemas (in glorious STINK-O-VISION!) from March 20th. The trailer and poster artwork have been posted below for your convenience.
