DEAD LOVER (Grace Glowicki, 2025)
On Halloween night, in the QFT in Belfast, a humble crowd of movie-goers gathered to watch 1931’s Dracula hosted by Mark Kermode. LITTLE did this crowd know they weren’t the only people travelling back to the 30s that night… For in the next screen, a crowd got the privilege to see Dead Lover.
It’s rare to see a newly released film so reminiscent of early cinema, and it’s even rarer for a film as horny and perverse (in the good way) as Dead Lover to be able to do this, but somehow it does. The film follows a lonely gravedigger, played by director Grace Glowicki, desperate for a lover to grow old with. Unfortunately for her, the stench of death is stuck to her, and no matter what she does she can’t mask it. This puts off all prospects of a man falling for her, until she meets an impossibly horny dandy/gothic romantic poet, played by co-writer Ben Petrie, who becomes enamoured with not just the gravedigger, but her scent. They fall in love, fast and hard, prepared to grow old together and start a family, but things don’t work out as perfectly as planned… The loving poet dies at sea, leaving behind only his finger. Of course, the choice is obvious here; the gravedigger uses science and this left-behind finger to try and bring him back to life. What follows is pure madness which we won’t spoil for you here, you need to see it to believe it. The film is insane, but amongst all this insanity is honestly a tenderhearted love story that’s entirely sweet and poetic. You fall in love with the gravedigger, just as she did with her long-lost-beau, and you root for her to succeed in bringing him back, and to escape the grasps of those that aim to harm her throughout the film. It’s trashy in the way a John Waters film is trashy, that is to say; perfectly, as well as being hilarious and as we’re about to say a lot in this review: UNIQUE!
Writer/Director Grace Glowicki starring as the romantic, but smelly, gravedigger.
The cast is small but mighty, made up of only four people, including writer-director-star Grace Glowicki herself, as well as her co-writer Ben Petrie, and each person (besides Glowicki) is playing at least five different roles. Each cast member brings something different to every character they play, going from an old gossiping woman to a horny reanimated corpse is no small feat, but doesn’t come across as jarring here at all. In fact, this added a charm to the film that maybe a bigger cast would have killed. Each character is meticulously crafted, all completely unique in their own ways, and what helps this more is the amazing costuming and make up on this film. The gravedigger’s ghostly face and dirty pantaloons, several corpses, chiselled cheekbones on various men, and the lover’s odd but amazing ginger bob wig, every character had their own look different not just from any other character within the film, but maybe different from any character in any film ever.
The film is unique and singular in every way. Frankenstein is a tale that is maybe becoming over-done, a new one just came out this week! And while this film isn’t a retelling of Frankenstein, or a parody of it, it still falls under that broad area of playing God and creating life from something else, but entirely in its own way, and definitely unlike anything we’d ever seen before. The story and the costuming, as spoken about, help with this, but something that pushes this further is the astounding set design, the world created on screen. The film wasn’t shot on location, nor on a traditional set, but rather in a simple black box theatre. There are few set pieces on screen, rather just mainly a few different props, and yet we’re still completely sucked into this world. The opaque backgrounds of endless darkness add to the reality of the world we find ourselves in here, this world is bleak, maybe there would never be a sunrise here anyway, at least not for our helpless gravedigger. Adding to this is the spectacular cinematography, by Rhayne Vermette. The film was shot on 16mm which adds a whole new layer of rich texture to this world, and also helps with that 1930s, German Expressionist feel. Every single shot, every moment of the film is striking, and its clear that Grace Glowicki had a clear, singular, unique vision for all aspects of her film, from the writing to the production to the edit and everything in between.
If you get a chance to see this film, take it. John Waters would want you to, and we here at Best Boy want you to as well.
