The endeavors of love and lust can feel like matters of life and death, but the films which compose this dispatch also find the humor in these escapades. I was lucky enough to catch two of these three films at their premieres; to feel the laughter of identification sweep through the women in the audience. The first of which was Grace Glowicki’s “Dead Lover,” which I caught at The Ray.
A woman known only as the Gravedigger (Grace Glowicki) is lonely. A generational cemetery worker, she spends her days and nights alone digging graves, lurking over funerals, lamenting her single status, and … reeking. In a Süskind-esque effort, the Gravedigger attempts to concoct a chemist’s solution to her putrid odor in the hopes of finding a man who won’t be repulsed by her. One day, when a mourner stumbles into her neck of the yard, he is infatuated immediately, despite her unfixable stench. What follows is an intense, passionate love affair.
Yet when her beloved endeavors overseas for a solution to his infertility, choppy waters take his life, leaving behind only his finger for the Gravedigger to find. It’s this loss that turns Glowicki’s absurd horror-comedy into a Frankenstein tale, as the Gravedigger tries to grow her lover back to life with only his appendage as a starting point. Even as the story evolves, the hilarious raunchfest of “Dead Lover” maintains its surreal comedic chops.
It is pure theatre. Filmed entirely on a soundstage, Glowicki fully leans into the raving madhouse that is her film. “Dead Lover” rejoices in its nefarious, irreverent exploration of the hilarity of sexuality and loneliness. And while it is likely to be a love it or hate it film, the joy the team had creating it emanates from the screen. Whether the comedy lands for you is a testament to Glowicki’s commitment to her form. It’s batty, boisterous, and unashamed. The script flows with a system of poetic punchlines that give the film a charmingly anachronistic tone — like if Oscar Wilde dropped a tab of acid in 2025. The structure of physical comedy can’t go without noting either, whether it’s bringing the shovel to sexy time, a patois-speaking sailor (because why not), or a pair of lusty lesbian nuns, Glowicki’s comedic chops pulse through primary and peripheral moments of the storytelling.
Chloé Robichaud’s “Two Women” is another raunchy laugh factory of female existentialism and sex drive. Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) and Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) are two women who share a wall in their Quebec apartment complex. Violette is a new mother, getting burnt out from maternity leave and exasperated by her flippant but emotionally laborious husband. She’s also hearing a crow … or at the very least the sounds of one, which she believes to be Florence’s exhibitionist moans coming from beyond her bedroom wall.
Little does she know that Florence (hopped up on her SSRIs to suppress her depression and high-risk behavior) is in a sexless relationship with her longtime partner. And with Violette, whose husband sees her exclusively as a mother rather than a lover, this becomes the core of the ladies’ relationship. As Florence takes a break from her pills and Violette from the imposed definitions of new motherhood, the women take a step out of monogamy and into sexual exploration to find what they feel they’ve been missing. What ensues is a deeply hilarious, but also emotionally moving foray into the relationship between sex and autonomy.
Every sexcapade of the two women takes place in their homes while their husbands are away: plumbers, window washers, exterminators, fixers of the domestic space, literally and metaphorically in Robichaud’s world. Yet even with the fires of desire taking center stage in “Two Women,” Gonthier-Hyndman and Leboeuf’s electric chemistry as a duo perseveres. With Florence’s shameless, unhinged approach and Violette’s coyness, they complement each other with side-splitting perfection.
“Two Women” surveys stagnant relationships as an accessory to its riling rompfests. Florence’s partner has become so comfortable with their non-intimacy that he hilariously (though damnably) starts “taking antidepressants” as an excuse to have no sex drive. There’s a wedge between them, and he is unwilling to investigate how to chip away at it. Violette’s unfaithful husband is caught up in the hots of his own infidelity, yet when he realizes that the power dynamics of his affair are less weighed in his favor than he believed, his tail starts to tuck. Robichaud subverts the idea of female submissiveness in the sexual charge of relationships, but manages it better with the women at the forefront rather than the men who pushed them away (both a critique and a compliment in their own ways).
Humor is on the outskirts of “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake,” but alas is still an element that colors Laura Casabe’s picture. Nati (Dolores Oliverio) is infatuated with her good friend, Diego (Agustín Sosa), with whom she’s had a long-standing “will they, won’t they” relationship. Along with her best friends, sisters Josefina (Isabel Bracamonte) and Mariela (Candela Flores), the group spend their summer days together, often at the pool. But when an older, more experienced woman, Silvia (Fernanda Echevarría), enters the picture with her sights set on Diego, the bedrock foundations of the group start to quake.
Intermixed with the central love triangle is the reminder of a brutal act of violence that Nati witnesses at the beginning of the film. When a drunk man is nearly beaten to death in the street in front of her home, no one bothers to rinse his pool of blood from the road. The site festers, gaining flies and emitting an aura that Nati can’t ignore from the sight of her front window. And when Nati’s grandmother proposes a witchy spell, burning Silvia’s name in a jar, “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” begins an exciting juggle of manifestation and magic realism. Once Nati’s carnal desires turn supernatural, a “Carrie”-esque energy begins to possess her, and Casabe’s film morphs less into a dilemma of the heart and more into a primal coming-of-age.
Josefina and Mariela play the stoic straight man, often hilariously so, to Nati’s free wheeling agency and decision making. And through the ever-shifting, swelling tension of the group, a throughline of class commentary plays out: Silvia may be posturing to be someone she’s not, Nati and her grandmother have taken in an aimless young boy, and no one seems to care about the aftermath of the man who was nearly killed in front of their eyes. Girlhood is rendered in matters of agency and violence — sexual authority and the fear of scarcity, and the discovery of how to come into your own power. “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” is a vivid portrait of a small community and friend group, pairing with the relationship between esteem and desire that turns Nati’s coming-of-age into its own form of urban legend.
