BHFF Review: DEAD LOVER (2025)

Image courtesy of IMDB

By Tom Milligan

Don’t let the fact that DEAD LOVER opens with a quote from Mary Shelley lead you to believe that this is simply another retread of the iconic Frankenstein mythos. Instead, Canadian filmmaker and star Grace Glowicki lets her freak flag fly in this demented, hilarious, romantic romp about the lengths one is willing to go in the name of true love. 

This is the tale of a grave-digging woman who longs for a soulmate. The problem is that her line of work has thwarted her from finding her other half, as she perpetually stinks of rotting corpses. By luck, she meets a man (co-writer Ben Petrie) who loves her foul scent the way it is, and the two instantly hit it off. When he learns of her dream to have children, he ventures out on a quest to fix his infertility, updating her sporadically with love letters that would make James Joyce proud. When she learns that her lover has perished on his voyage, she makes it her mission to bring him back to life through questionable scientific means. 

Glowicki and company keep things loose and nimble. Plotting here isn’t particularly rigid, nor does it feel hurried. The cast is limited to just four actors, each of whom plays several characters throughout: Glowicki, Petrie, Leah Doz, and Lowen Morrow. They not only commit to the singular vision but also manage to sell the notion that love is a force that can be equal parts beautiful and gross. It’s a minor miracle that a movie in which one of the actors lustfully utters the line “I want to pick up a piece of your poo and eat it like a banana” (and that’s not me paraphrasing) is as emotionally consistent as it is. 

Presented in dreamy matte colors on minimal black sets, there’s a theatrical, handmade quality to every component on screen. Shot on 16mm, I’d be tempted to compare it to watching a stage play, but that would be ignoring some of its most charming cinematic flourishes. 2D-animated lightning strikes, for instance, drive home the film’s German Expressionist roots. The over-the-top accents and performances of the cast are very much a feature, not a bug. 

I was fortunate enough to attend a surprise “Stink-O-Vision” screening of the film (a nod to past scratch-and-sniff gimmicks a la “Smell-O-Vision”). At the end of the day, it’s still a gimmick here as well, but a fitting one in that it complements the recurring motif of rancid odors and putrid flesh. This is a midnight movie, after all, and I presume most crowds will have a ball if they’re willing to surrender themselves to something so down with being dirty. 

DEAD LOVER had its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on October 18th, 2025.