Wildly absurd Canadian comedy Dead Lover will tickle your nose, among other things

Dead Lover

Directed by Grace Glowicki

Written by Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie

Starring Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie and Ben Petrie (again)

Classification N/A; 84 minutes

Opens in Toronto April 3; Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal April 10; and Vancouver April 17

Critic’s Pick

It has been a banner year for graverobbers. After Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, along comes Canadian filmmaker Grace Glowicki’s delightfully ghoulish Dead Lover to complete the “it’s allliiiiive” trifecta – even if it cost roughly 1/100,000th of either major-studio production. More importantly, Glowicki also beats her competing Mary Shelley acolytes to the punch.

After its world premiere at the January, 2025, Sundance Film Festival – which was followed by a warmly received sprint around the North American festival circuit – including a riotous Midnight Madness stop at the Toronto International Film Festival – Glowicki’s “camp phantasmagoria” delivers a truly unforgettable comic nightmare that lingers deeply (Whether or not your screening features the filmmaking team’s radical “smell-o-vision” scratch-and-sniff cards.)

A Shelley riff filtered through the no-budget prism of a Guy Maddin movie, with more than a touch of morbid Mel Brooks style humour, Dead Lover follows the exploits of an unnamed 17th-century gravedigger (Glowicki) whose foul stench keeps any romantic suitors far away. But one day, our leading lady attracts the attention of a local lothario (Ben Petrie), who finds her deathly aroma irresistible. Unfortunately for both would-be lovers, Petrie’s character perishes in a shipwreck, leaving only his severed finger to fill the gravedigger’s heart (among other places).

Detailing the comic misadventures that follow is an exercise in madness, as Glowicki – who wrote the film with Petrie, her real-life partner – piles on one delightfully surreal element after another, all soundtracked to a wonderfully, cryptic score from Meghan Remy (better known for her pop band, U.S. Girls).

The real trick of the film, though, is how it constantly steadies itself in the face of ever-mounting absurdity. This is a movie of such sexual outrageousness and stylized depravity that it should topple over every few minutes. And yet Glowicki and Petrie (who plays multiple roles) ride the razor’s edge of delirium to create something fantastical, even beautiful. The impact doubles, or even triples, if you follow up a screening of Dead Lover by watching Glowicki and Petrie keep the doomed-romance theme going in the recently released thriller Honey Bunch.

All that said, your mileage may vary. Shot in a black-box stage on a 16mm Bolex camera, with just one zoom lens, the film is aggressively DIY in spirit and execution. Glowicki has cited the experimental underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger as an influence, and that alone should ward off audiences who are merely looking for a new monster mash.

But if you want to walk away from a film with its particular aroma still sticking to your clothes – and if you want to see what two of this country’s most fiercely talented performers can do when given almost no creative restrictions – then set a date in stone for Dead Lover.