Dead Lover isn’t shy about its status as a Frankenstein riff. In fact, it opens with a quote from Mary Shelley’s novel: “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” In the story, this line is delivered by the doctor Victor Frankenstein, as he ponders what force may be compelling him to play God in creating a new, living being from the dead. But in Dead Lover, the first part of the sentence fades away, leaving the second half to linger on screen: “I do not understand.” It’s a humorous bit of foreshadowing that points not only to the ineptitude of the mad scientist in this story, but the narrative at large’s offbeat comic tone.
Dead Lover is the sophomore feature of Canadian indie darling Grace Glowicki, who wrote, directed, and stars in the movie as a smelly and lonely gravedigger. In her outrageously thick cockney accent, the gravedigger waxes poetic to the moon shining bright outside her window about how she longs for a lover. And then suddenly, at the graveside of his deceased sister (Leah Doz), she finds him (Ben Petrie). This gentleman’s aristocratic trappings may appear at odds with the gravedigger’s dirty dowdiness, but they fast prove to be the perfect match. The man even loves her stench— he gets off on it, you could say, and he woos her with grotesque phrases spoken with a lover’s breathlessness: “I want to eat your poo, like a banana.”
This flowery, lascivious prose continues in the letters he writes her when— after the pair begin to make plans to start a family and he discovers he’s impotent— he sails across the ocean to participate in an experimental trial to restore his virility. The man never returns, however; he perishes at see, a trio of sailors who speak in a barely decipherable tongue returning to the gravedigger the only remaining piece they could find of him in a bag: his severed finger.
The broad strokes of where the story goes from this point are obvious— the gravedigger uses some rudimentary science mumbo jumbo to attempt to resurrect her dead lover from the DNA left in his finger, with unanticipated results— but the details are all Glowicki’s own (and that of her partner, costar and cowriter Petrie). Dead Lover has a striking look that serves a dual purpose, merging the practicality of limited sets and low-budget props and special effects with a unique aesthetic beauty. The film was shot on two soundstages, black box style, thus obscuring the sameness of the location and eliminating the need for set dressing while brilliantly highlighting the characters and props, that are frequently lit with either deep cool blues or soft warm tones. The latter in particular specifically evokes the early two-color Technicolor process that was briefly utilized at the start of the 1930s in Hollywood, in which the use of only red and green tones just divorced what was seen on screen from reality enough to craft an unsettling beauty. In this way, Dead Lover— which opens with a brief laboratory sequence shot in this style, a near-perfect match in both visuals and tone for something like the offbeat 1932 Warner Brothers’ Technicolor horror Doctor X— effectively positions itself as a throwback to Hollywood horror’s heyday, launched by one of the film’s key inspirations: Universal’s 1931 Frankenstein.
The eye candy sprinkled throughout Dead Lover doesn’t stop there. Stop-motion is used extensively to bring lizards, flowers, and that finger (employed to increasingly hilarious ends) to life. 2D-animated flashes of lightning reflect the film’s earnest embrace of artificiality and theatricality, which carries over into its use of intentionally poor wigs and makeup on its characters (who also include angry townsfolk, lesbian nuns, and a trio of women who provide stuffy commentary on the film’s events), all of whom are played by the same rotating cast of four actors (Glowicki, Petrie, Doz, and Lowen Morrow). Their performance styles are just as purposefully over-the-top, and while Glowicki’s hamming for the camera admittedly grows tiresome after a spell, at least she’s committed, and cuts a striking figure in her tall frame and elastic face. That, paired with Dead Lover’s grotesque and bizarre sense of humor, means that this film certainly won’t appeal to everyone. But it works, in no small part because every madcap act is undercut by sincere yearning. Everyone in Dead Lover desires to be with someone, mostly for sex, but companionship is certainly a factor as well, especially for the gravedigger. The film plays with its source material in myriad ways—a fascinating blurring of gender lines occurs by having the cast portray both male and female characters, and by having the male lover resurrected in a woman’s body— but most importantly in how the narrative largely swings away from concentrating on the central character’s God complex and toward how their actions are motivated by loneliness and desire. It’s a macabre little movie that’s destined to find its audience in cult film fanatics and Shelly devotees alike.
Dead Lover screened at the 2025 Hysteria Fest, and is being distributed by Yellow Veil Pictures. Runtime: 79 minutes.
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