Some jobs you can’t help taking home with you: the workload, the accompanying stress, maybe even the horrible smell. The latter is very much the case with the lonely gravedigger (Grace Glowicki) at the center of Dead Lover. She wants a husband and kids, but what’s a girl to do when she carries the fetid stench of rot wherever she goes?
That doesn’t exactly leave her popular with the fellas—that is, until the right sicko, a red-haired horndog (Ben Petrie) who happens to think that her stink is her best quality, comes along. Pity, though, that he isn’t long for this world, which is only a spoiler if you watch Glowicki’s film without knowing its title. So when an ill-fated sea voyage leaves our desperate protagonist with little more than her beau’s severed finger, she’s willing to do anything to bring him back.
Dead Lover is pitched somewhere between a Monty Python sketch and a black-box theater production of Frankenstein. The manner of the film is spare, equally reliant on cheap-looking scenery as colored lighting to set the scene. (In the case of the aforementioned boat journey, the filmmakers achieve the rain effect by sprinkling water in front of the camera.) In the lead role, Glowicki delivers most of her lines in a cockney shriek, and of the four actors in total, she’s the only one who doesn’t play multiple, gender-agnostic roles. And in addition to the gravedigger’s suitor, Petrie also plays a fornicating nun and a member of a catty sewing circle.
The can-do spirit of Dead Lover, as evidenced by the way it couples goofy sound effects with cuts and camera movements, takes it a long way. Some of the dialogue is rhymed, and there’s a disarming sweetness to the filthy flirtations between the gravedigger and her not-yet-dead lover—yes, even when he voices his desire to “peel and eat her poop like a banana.”
Alas, this zany energy is the kind that burns bright and short. When the time comes for the gravedigger to reap the monstrous fruits of her resurrection efforts, Glowicki’s film withers on the vine as the characters start running in circles and the stylistic novelty wears thin. But say this for Dead Lover, at least: Even in such close proximity to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, it still feels like nothing else.
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