First premiering at Sundance 2025 and having a couple of showings at the local Milwaukee Film Festival this past month for their midnight screening series, Dead Lover is an offbeat romance not for the faint of heart. Filled with grotesque guts and atrocious smells, the narrative still depicts a legitimately moving love story regardless of its morbid subject matter.
Directed and starring Grace Glowicki, the humorous horror movie centers around an outcast gravedigger shunned by the rest of the community for her deathly odor of rotten bodies and overall oddball nature.
Believing she is destined to die alone, that all changes when she meets the man of her dreams who, instead of despising her deadly aroma like everyone else, relishes in her filth and eccentric behavior. The two quickly start a ridiculous and over-the-top but charming affair that would rouse even the coldest corpse awake from a deep slumber.
Inspired by the likes of Frankenstein and the works of Monty Python, their sweet relationship is unfortunately cut short when he dies at sea making a fateful trip to undergo fertility treatments. This sets the grimy protagonist on a diehard mission to revive her lost partner no matter the means and nasty rumors spreading about.
There is no getting around the fact that the peculiar movie is a glorified theater production, being extremely low budget. It still makes the best use of these limited resources. This evident constraint becomes a great stylish choice that makes the straight-up bizarre piece stand out and come across as entirely self-serving.
Despite only having four actors play all the characters, this small cast has amazing comedic timing and enough stage presence to make audiences forget this rotating ensemble seamlessly. Not to mention, the talented makeup and costuming teams do an outstanding job of bringing these hideous transformations and antiquated outfits to life, fully realizing a gross-out fairytale and constructing this powerful illusion.
The sets are obviously in a black box room with no effort made to hide or be ashamed about this artistic choice. The creators embrace the unusual effect by each scene coming across as a bit claustrophobic and misty like fog machines at the club. Yet these dark environments add to the slapstick appeal and surreal fun of the film rather than detract. This makes everything seem much more intimate and cartoonish as the viewers are personally included in the uproarious hijinks.
What cannot be glossed over either is the wondrous score by the U.S. Girls that is perfectly 80s inspired, taken right from this neon-colored era and facilitating a retro lo-fi vibe. The glowing lighting in its vibrant purples and devilish greens makes the whole picture seem like a sticky VHS tape stored at the back of a dying video store; decadently fiendish and awfully atmospheric.
For fans of the camp icon that is John Waters and the heavily underrated “Lisa Frankestein,” alongside those looking for a new strange movie to be driftingly sucked in by during the middle of a sleepless night or a nonstop romp to watch with friends, “Dead Lover” will definitely fill this wicked niche and more.