About a year ago, I sat down for what was probably my sixth movie of the day at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. My eyes were burning, my brain was melting. But then “Dead Lover” lit up the screen before me, and my eyes felt renewed with energy. When you can recognize that you’re seeing something new, fresh, unique – your eyes tend to readjust. Grace Glowicki’s second feature film “Dead Lover” is a colorful, Frankenstein-inspired dark comedy that jumps into a surreal world with a colorful cast of characters filtered through the protagonist (played by Glowicki), a foul smelling gravedigger looking for love. I had the chance to chat with Glowicki about her process and her delightfully strange film before its official release.
In Glowicki’s film, the character known only as ‘Gravedigger’ lives a lonely life in her shack by the graveyard. She watches people come to mourn their lost loved ones while she longs for a love of her own. When Lover (Ben Petrie) enters her orbit, a passionate love affair is born. Before it really gets to bloom, however, Lover dies in a shipwreck. Racked with grief, Gravedigger begins not-so-scientific experiments in an attempt to bring her lover back from the dead.
My first question, a question that I had wondered since that first screening a year ago, was how did something so original come to be? The film’s aesthetic is jarringly sparse – a black set with very distinct yet few set pieces that give you the vibe of the setting. According to Glowicki, “your mind fills in all the gaps that aren’t in front of you, in the way when you’re reading a book.” Her theatrical background is evident, especially in her approach to the cast of actors. Ben Petrie (a co-writer with Glowicki), Leah Doz, and Lowen Morrow – who all play multiple characters in the film – round out a true theater troupe ensemble.
“As I would become an actor and move through the indie film world, so often there was this sort of religion around realism and how you needed, if you’re going to shoot a 1970s movie, you need the cars in the background to be perfect. You need the wallpaper to be perfect, all of this stuff. And I just always kind of didn’t find that terribly interesting – needing to be literal and needing to be sort of visually prescriptive. I think it all stems from my love of the simplicity of black box theaters and watching a theatre show.”
The concept for the film stemmed first from thinking that a gravedigger would be an interesting protagonist. “That was the initial sort of hook that would pull that kernel to the finish line of the final product of the movie. It kind of just evolved in this really improvisational way, where through a series of spitballing with friends in different versions, it would find its way to this final form.”
Over a process of three or four years, Glowicki worked off of friends and fellow theater performers to workshop the idea, until she and Ben Petrie eventually penned the script together. This being Glowicki’s second feature film, she felt more confident in the act of making an actual movie, but new anxieties revealed themselves.
“I think the further you go into your career and the more you get feedback about your work, whether it’s as an actor or a filmmaker, you do start to realize when you make something, all my peers will see this and they will judge it. That can be a hard thing to counterbalance in your mind. So that was probably harder with the second one, having to really kind of muscle my way to not care about where the film would end up, how it would be received. Mostly, I think it gets easier because you – just like any other trade or craft – you are better. You’re more confident the more you do it.”
Something I took notice of the second time viewing “Dead Lover” was how much of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein itself are in the current zeitgeist. Films like Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride,” as well as the 2024 film “Lisa Frankenstein,” all point to a renewed interest in the timeless story Mary Shelley wrote over a hundred years ago. Why?
“They must be happening for some [reason]. The cultural, the unconscious, must be processing something. So I can’t help but think that maybe there’s something around Covid and the political climate and wars and AI. I think people are starting to feel as though a past way of being has died in some way, has ended in some way. And my thought is that all these Frankenstein movies are coming up because it’s almost sort of a knee jerk reaction. When something dies, we try to hold on to it, piece it back together and try to bring it back to life so we don’t have to process the grief of what we’ve lost.”
Glowicki also readily admits that she has never read the original novel of Frankenstein, but that also informed her interest in making a film like “Dead Lover.”
“I wasn’t inspired by the literal piece. But I was inspired by how… I’m thirty-eight and having just ingested so many trickle down Frankenstein stories. It was just interesting to me that I had this frankensteinian, cobbled together interpretation of this source material that I actually had never read. I thought that was just so cool, that almost in the way stories used to be told orally, that I could soak up the story without having actually sat down and read it.”
Something else I couldn’t help but admire in Glowicki’s film was the underlying queerness to it. You have actors playing multiple characters regardless of gender. The transformation into something new and indescribable also speaks to gender fluidity. There is also a comedic scene in which two nuns perform cunnilingus on each other (this got the biggest laugh out of me). It was clear that these aspects also related back to Glowicki’s theatrical approach to the film.
“I think it just sort of came about naturally. We just tried to let ourselves be very free in the development of the project. In the spirit of comedy like old theater troupes, like Monty Python, or SNL – allowing ourselves to play different roles. To not care too much about gender or sexuality. Also, a lot of queer people contributed to the development of this story. So it’s sort of this mash up of all of our different identities and sexualities. More than that, I think it’s just in the spirit of creative freedom and fluidity. Things coming out queer is kind of just a result of when we free ourselves from being too concerned with labels or binaries or boxes. I think [about] what the human imagination does with a concept like sexuality. It wanders because that’s what sexuality is. It’s devious and inappropriate and rebellious and doesn’t follow the rules. It’s its own little beast. I think that’s why it feels quite queer.”
As our time began to run out, I asked Glowicki a final question: What would she like audiences to take away from her film?
“I think when we were writing it, we were talking about ‘what’s the moral of the story?’ If there was one. And I think it’s if you love it, let it go. Any attempt to avoid pain by holding and grasping and trying to control – I think that will only end up, literally or metaphorically, killing you. So that would be the takeaway. I think if you love it, let it go”
“Dead Lover” releases in theaters March 20th.
