Dead Lover Movie Review
The life of the gravedigger is a tough one. No friends, no acquaintances, no loved ones. The world at large just wants nothing to do with the gravediggers. And who can blame them? Do you want to associate with people whose daily moments are filled with death and decay?
Didn’t think so. Nor does anyone else. So, no one loves the grave diggers. They’re too morbid. Too depressing.
Worst of all: they stink. Even if their profession were palatable to the general public, the lingering odor of the dead is enough to keep friendship at bay forever.
But gravediggers need love too. And when they do find someone that can stomach who they are and how they smell, the gravedigger has no choice but to cling to that person and refuse to let go.
Not even death can keep them apart.
And so, we have Dead Lover. A low-brow, high-art, minimalist production about the lengths we go for love. Along with all the fluids and excretions that go along with it. This is the kind of movie that no one wanted, no one asked for, and no one even expressed a whiff of desire for it to be made.
But stupid things like a lack of public interest can’t stop true art. Director Grace Glowicki along with her team of collaborators Leah Doz, Lowen Morrow, and Ben Petrie prove once again that you don’t need big budgets and outlandish special effects to make a great movie. All it takes is a little bit of creativity and a dash of ingenuity.
That, and a willingness to be immensely disgusting. That helps too.
Dead Lover takes a gleefully sophomoric approach to its already absurdist love story, reveling in all things slimy, squishy, and generally gross for no reason other than the pure thrill of it. Applying that mindset to what is essentially a Frankenstein adaptation puts it into a fantastically contradictory state of being. On the one hand it’s artfully stylized and seemingly literary, while at the same time it’s deliberately crass in the playfully immature style of a child that refuses to grow up. Somehow it works.
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It wears its Romantic heart on its filthy sleeve. And I mean proper Romantic. Not the cheap novels you can find on the rack in the grocery store. The one’s with the chiseled, waxed, and oiled specimens of virility riding a horse. Not that modern smut.
The classic smut.
The bombastic, emotional, and overwrought works of the early 19th century. Before the invention of showers. The stuff written by the deviants that truly embraced the agonies and ecstasies of love, death, and Holy-God-What’s-That-Smell kind of smells.
It’s on the subject of smells that Dead Lover truly brings its aromatic themes to fruition. The trailer for the movie advertises its showings as having Stink-O-Vision. Taking a page straight out of the William Castle handbook, in-person screenings are accompanied by Scratch-and-Sniff cards. During choice disgusting moments, a number appears in the corner of the screen, and the audience can sniff the corresponding number on the card to get the full cinematic experience.
It’s one thing to make a movie for the sake of being gross. It’s another thing to invite the audience to literally inhale your grossness. That’s the kind of next-level thinking that your typical trash-cinema (the greatest kind of cinema) rarely approaches. There’s a technical proficiency on display here, combined with the sheer exuberance toward the craft of filmmaking, that really sets Glowicki and company apart from their contemporaries.
One gets the impression that they could have done anything they wanted. An entire world of critically acclaimed award winners was at their fingertips. They could have made the next indie tearjerker, or moderately entertaining comedy, or another one of those movies about how much divorce sucks. They could have made any of those kinds of movies and done perfectly fine for themselves.
But that’s not what they did.
They chose to make this instead.
That’s called artistry.
Is Dead Lover the kind of movie that will appeal to everybody? Oh, not at all. You’ll get a good idea if this movie is for you pretty quickly. You’ll get a good idea if it’s not for you even faster. But for some of us, this kind of madness scratches an itch that we never knew we had. I’d recommend giving it a watch just for the sheer uniqueness of its style. If you’re lucky, you may even be able to catch a theatrical screening, smells and all. But even without the gimmicks, Dead Lover is worth a watch.
At the very least, it doesn’t stink.
