The Premiere of “Dead Lover” Showcases Grave Robbing and Sex With A Giant Finger

By Jordan Crucchiola

“Only at Midnight!” is a tagline that could rightly be emblazoned across a poster for Dead Lover, a horror-inflected comedy from writer, director, producer, and star Grace Glowicki. “We on the programming team love to see Midnight as the home of the original, the eerie, and the wild,” says senior programmer Heidi Zwicker as she introduces the premiere screening on January 24 at The Ray Theatre. “So we could not be more excited to have found a film like Dead Lover.”

Even if you read the plot description, there’s really no preparing for the eccentricity of Glowicki’s second feature film. The story follows Grave Digger (Glowicki), a woman with a thick imitation of a Cockney English accent, and whose greatest ambition in life is to find someone who loves her despite her pungent body odor — a hazard of the trade for a person who buries corpses for a living. 

But one day, against all odds, she meets the Lover of her dreams (Ben Petri). Not only is he unbothered by her scent, he lusts after her for it. Grave Digger’s happily ever after finally seems within her grasp when tragedy rips Lover away, lost at sea. Lost, that is, except for a single finger that is returned to Grave Digger by the seamen with whom he was traveling. With the lone digit in her possession, Grave Digger vows to bring her beloved back to life through a homespun Dr. Frankenstein setup. The townspeople doubt her and spread petty gossip. Her experiments fail over and over again. But Grave Digger will not be deterred! Eventually, she succeeds in her endeavor — sort of — with surprising results. 

“Every experience I’ve ever had working with Grace as an actor, I feel she pushes me so far out of my comfort zone, and I’m trying to convince her it’s going to be a disaster,” says actor and co-writer Ben Petri at the post-premiere Q&A, when describing his initial reaction to Dead Lover. “And by the end I am so grateful that she pushed me into that zone. So, at first I think my reaction was terror, then once we got to the line ‘I want to pick up a piece of your poo and eat it like a banana’ I felt like, ‘I know what this is and I am locked and loaded.’” Actor Leah Doz follows Petri with a similar sentiment, telling the audience, “I feel like she wrote so many extremes into this film, and it disturbs people and it’s scary and it’s vulgar. And when do we get to do that? In Grace’s films.”

Zwicker describes Dead Lover as “triumphantly weird” and “wonderfully dark,” but the darkness comes in service of so much absurd joy. Actors play gender-swapped roles and appear as multiple characters. The accents are preposterous. The mandate for sound design was to underscore the film’s “wacky” tone. The silliness of the human body is lovingly sent up in preposterous sex scenes, and the acting is so theatrical and outlandish that even those in the way, way back are able to follow along. The whole film is an incredibly collaborative effort, with Glowicki saying that Doz wrote the final scene, and that special effects makeup artist Michael Harmon wrote a duel for the Widower character, played by Lowen Morrow, who also contributed as a “movement director.” 

Petri is repeatedly shown performing as Lover dancing in a nightdress, because costume designer Courtney Mitchell felt they lacked enough footage of the beautiful garment. As Glowicki recounts, Mitchell approached her during shooting and said, “‘Dude. I don’t think we shot the nightgown enough. I’m really concerned. It’s a key costume piece.’ And Courtney is absolutely brilliant,” says Glowicki. “So I thought, ‘This girl is right. There’s something wrong.’” And thus, the Lover’s nightgown dance became a featured part of the film.

Every aspect of Dead Lover feels hand sewn with care, and in the most wonderful way possible, the film’s sets seem like they were borrowed from a local high school drama production. This aligns perfectly with Glowicki’s interest in “experimental DIY theater,” which the director calls “our aesthetic compass” in bringing it all to life. She also workshopped Dead Lover with a troupe in Toronto that specializes in “super-experimental clown theater, kind of,” and she cites her screen influences as “screwball comedy, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, cartoons, hagsploitation. Young Frankenstein, obviously.” One does not have to look hard to find these comics and works as foundational inspiration shining through in her movie.

Taken all together, Dead Lover emerges as a campy and inspiring group project from Glowicki and company that embodies the Sundance Film Festival’s most independent spirit. “Thank you Sundance for supporting this film,” she tells the audience. “It means the world, and when we were making this movie we always thought, ‘Sundance Midnight! That would be the best!’ So we are so thrilled to be here.”