How Dead Lover Mixes Pulpy Camp With Emotional Sincerity Explained By Director & Cast

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has gotten a colorful and theatrical new take from award-winning filmmaker Grace Glowicki with Dead Lover, which recently arrived at SXSW. The film marks Glowicki’s second feature-length effort in the director’s chair, and her first in five years since debuting with the darkly comedic thriller Tito, which also screened at SXSW and netted her the Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award. Dead Lover also previously made its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it garnered strong reviews for its zany take on the iconic sci-fi fantasy tale.

In addition to directing, Glowicki leads the Dead Lover cast as Gravedigger, a lonely woman who longs to fall in love with someone, though fails to attract anyone’s attention due to the aroma of dead bodies that lingers on her from her job. When she finds her dream man, Lover, happiness finally seems on the horizon for her, only for him to drown while at sea, leaving her heartbroken as she’s left with only his severed finger. Driven by her grief, Gravedigger seeks to revive him through a series of madcap experiments.

In honor of the movie’s SXSW premiere, ScreenRant interviewed co-writer/director/producer/star Grace Glowicki, co-writer/producer/star Ben Petrie and stars Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow to discuss Dead Lover. The group reflected on the unique journey of getting the movie made, including the stage rehearsals and trying every character’s role before landing on the ones they play in the final version. Glowicki and Petrie also discuss the movie’s balance of a campier atmosphere with emotionally sincere storytelling, and why the latter was so important to them.

Glowicki Sought To Create Her Own Writers Room Environment On Dead Lover

“…The Foundational Inspiration Was Those Strange Conversations With Those Four Pals.”

While her debut film, Tito, saw her solo write and direct, Glowicki expanded her creative circle going into Dead Lover‘s creation with a group of four other people: fellow filmmakers Haya Waseem and Harry Cepka, the latter of whom worked as a Second Unit Director on Tito; her longtime collaborator and real-life partner, Ben Petrie; and their psychotherapist friend, Matthew Devine. Her goal, as she described, was to “emulate a writers room” with “completely unstructured free association” conversations, in which they would “spitball movie concepts and characters“, which led to the “foundational inspiration” of the film.

Petrie also explained that one of Dead Lover‘s more curious elements — that being Lover’s finger delivered to Gravedigger in a canvas bag — actually came from a dream Devine had in which, “in his strange dream logic“, he was delivered a similar bag with an animate “severed penis“. Petrie went on to praise Glowicki for recognizing the potential for such a concept and reflecting on how to make it work in the film, as she “was just inviting people to bring in their ideas and trusting that the stuff had some kind of connection to the material that subconsciously would all end up coagulating into the goo of the project.”

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While Glowicki may have turned to her free-flowing writers room for the initial development of the film, Dead Lover is just as much carried by her and Petrie’s supporting cast, Strays‘ Leah Doz and theater performer Lowen Morrow, the latter of whom makes their on-screen debut. Interestingly, Morrow was initially tapped by Glowicki with the intention of helping develop the theatrical elements of the film, which resulted in them teaming up with the filmmaker and two other theater artists “for a few months” during which they all “rolled around on the floor” and “staged it like a play“.

Throughout this process, the biggest objective Morrow and the group kept in mind was determining “What’s the vibe” of Dead Lover, which resulted in them “trying different things with the characters, trying different accents, trying different voices” and “trying different physicality“, always ensuring that they were “developing it from a physical place” and “from an emotional place.” After a few things were “shuffled around” before production began, Glowicki offered Morrow a role thanks to their development involvement, as well as their experience as a puppeteer, with Glowicki recalling “Lowen needs to be in the movie with all of their skills.”

For Doz, she actually recalls being a fan of Glowicki’s and Petrie’s before being contacted to star in Dead Lover, having fallen in love with both Tito and their short film, Her Friend Adam, which was previously the nominee for SXSW’s Grand Jury Award for Narrative Short and won Glowicki the Sundance Short Film Special Jury Prize for Outstanding Performance. Doz pointed to the former, in particular, as being fascinated by it going “down the rabbit hole of a kind of absurdity and character exploration” that she was very keen to get to explore, particularly as “there are so few opportunities like that in film, and certainly Canadian independent film.”

Doz also pointed out her own theater background as being part of her excitement about joining Dead Lover‘s cast, describing Glowicki’s approach to the production as a “non-normative way of doing film” and recalling the filmmaker’s initial note that the draft of the script she sent Doz “would continue to grow in the next month when we would start rehearsing.”

“I was really drawn to its style, its theatricality, and the grotesque extremes that she was exploring in the script,” Doz went on to share. “And then, I was really drawn to this creature role, which was just something that I had never gotten to do before on film. I said nonverbal this morning, and that’s not right, it’s something where I could just be unconfined and unrestrained. I keep using those words, because I feel like they’re so thematic to this piece. Just a lack of restraint and a permission to be ugly and gross and celebrate that, so that’s what drew me in.“

Glowicki Never Wanted Her Stars To Feel Boxed In On Which Characters They Could Play

“…I Do My Best Work As An Actor When I Feel Super Empowered By A Director…”

With the rehearsal process having seen all four play nearly every role in the film, much like some of the most iconic Monty Python movies, this provided Glowicki with an interesting opportunity to review and determine who fit which roles better. As she reflected on the direct casting process, the filmmaker explained how in projects in which she is an actor, she’s lamented times in which she would prefer to play one role over the one offered to her, and that she does “my best work as an actor when I feel super empowered by a director“.

As such, for Petrie, Doz and Morrow, Glowicki wanted to ensure to “honor those situations where I wish I would’ve been more empowered by directors” and instead directly asked the group, “What characters do you guys want to play?“. She also celebrated that, thanks to their unconventional rehearsal process, “there was a spirit of not being too attached to things, of not being territorial about things“, but rather instead a “real communal vibe” among the group in which everyone’s roles “naturally settled” into the choices the stars made.

Petrie further expounded on this by denoting that while everyone had “a couple of side characters” they were playing, there were “really the flagship characters that I feel like we all knew which ones we were attracted to.” This did, however, lead to a humorous moment for the group in which, while sitting at the coffee shop Larry’s Folly in their home of Toronto, they had to “figure out logistically who could play what” by putting together a sheet of what characters would interact with each other for certain scenes:

It was like making a wedding seating plan or something, trying to figure out all of the different combinations that would conflict, and would compliment.

In looking at their character of Widower, Lover’s brother-in-law swept up in grief and drug use to avoid confronting his wife’s death, Glowicki reveals that Morrow had a lot of creative input on the visual design of the character, with her star “giving a lot of ideas to hair and costume“. Morrow also revealed that Widower was partly inspired by one of their Dungeons & Dragons characters, serving as “kind of a mashup” with the script, particularly the “sword and the upper-class [personality].” They also recall there being “some back and forth” in the efforts to land on the exact design of the character.

“[The Nine Inch Nails music video], ‘The Perfect Drug,‘ [was a big influence],” Morrow explained. “It had this look, and I was just like, ‘That, please.’ And then they added a bunch more makeup and drag to it. And I love a good long coat, you get to kind of throw it around when you’re walking. I love a sword and boots, and I really loved the character. He’s a masculine guy, but he’s got a fashion flare. A sad brooding man. I was saying earlier, he’s kind of Jon Snow meets The Crow, he’s just my dream role. Are you kidding me? [Laughs]“

Glowicki & Petrie Never Lost Sight Of The Emotional Core Of The Story

“…If Things Are Jump Camp Or Just Funny Or Just Silly, I Just Don’t Care.”

From the film’s opening moments all the way through its closing credits, it’s hard to deny that Dead Lover has a very pulpy aesthetic, with Glowicki having previously cited everything from Monty Python to Mel Brooks as major inspirations for the film. When asked about finding a balance between the Rocky Horror Picture Show-like atmosphere and a genuinely affecting story, Glowicki explains that she and Petrie always “tried to honor real emotional progression” in order to “tether the thing“, particularly as she feels absurd or campy content can lead to a general disinterest in the story:

For me, if things are just camp or just funny or just silly, I just don’t care. So, it was really important for me, and for us, to understand the emotional core of things. I was saying earlier, if you look at the story, there is an emotional logic that we tried to always honor. We knew what our character flaws were, so we, as performers and writers, tried to honor real emotional progression and stuff as a way to tether the thing. I knew that if we did that, we could have as much fun with camp and pulp and color and a ratchet aesthetic and a DOI aesthetic, because it would actually mean something and not just be like, “We’re wacky!” Which I hate in a movie when I’m just like, “Oh, who cares?” To be absurd in and of itself is masturbatory to me, so I think we knew what we had to hold on to in order to be watchable.

Petrie also acknowledged that while it would have been easy to fully lean into the absurdity of the film’s premise, he and Glowicki always had the objective to “commit to the emotional reality of these characters“. He specifically recalls filming a scene in which he “kept on wanting to do take after take” in the hopes of capturing the “emotional sincerity” of the scene, even in spite of the fact he was “in a pink translucent night gown, and a bright red Ron Weasley long-haired wig” while Glowicki was “in a corset covered in grime with the shovel“.

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Dead Lover

Release Date

January 24, 2025

Runtime

82 minutes

Director

Grace Glowicki

Writers

Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie

Producers

Ben Petrie, Yona Strauss, Tristan Scott-Behrends, Rhianon Jones