Dead Lover Review: A Go-for-Broke Grotesquerie Promises Fragrant Filth in Full Stink-O-Vision
Grace Glowicki's microbudget Canadian horror film, Dead Lover, follows a lovelorn gravedigger who salvages the corpse of her deceased sweetheart, delivering a morbidly perverse chamber play with a pastiche penny-dreadful plot. This curio arrives with a scratch-and-sniff Stink-O-Vision component, an unusual element that adds to its bizarre proposition, promising more art than fart despite its olfactory gimmick.
An Unusual Cinematic Experience
If memory serves, the last theatrical release to feature scratch-and-sniff was 2011's Spy Kids 4, which invited audiences to huff the gastric emissions of a yapping robot dog voiced by Ricky Gervais. In contrast, Dead Lover offers scents including "love", "opium", and "ghost puke", with "milkshake" providing light relief. Delicate sensibilities are advised to stay at home, as this film is designed to provoke and unsettle.
Plot and Characters
The heroine, played by writer-director-star Grace Glowicki, is a gravedigger of indeterminate age and origin, whose accent roams between Canada, Canvey Island, and Canberra, adding to the film's quirky charm. Driven to extremes after her verse-spouting poet sweetheart, co-writer Ben Petrie, perishes in a shipwreck, she embarks on a part-Burke and Hare, part-Victor Frankenstein mission to salvage his corpse.
The script blends elements of Carry On and Ken Russell, with lines like "I do hope he loves how big my bush has got while he's been away" during wistful botany scenes. Even without the scratch-and-sniff gimmick, and before the appearance of two lesbian nuns, much of the film qualifies as ripe and grotesque.
Style and Reception
Unmistakably the work of the industry area that nurtured Guy Maddin and the singing-rectum musical Zero Patience, Dead Lover requires viewers to lock on to its wavelength for rude chuckles; otherwise, the filthier fragrances may prompt headaches. It goes for gross and grotesque, bedding right down in its macabre themes.
Glowicki frames her go-for-broke performance within striking images and finds suggestive ways to cover budgetary holes, notably through nicely squishy practical effects. While it may be an acquired taste and smell, the film is distinctive, never dull, and difficult to shake, much like its most noxious niffs.
Dead Lover is set for release in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 March, offering a unique and unsettling cinematic experience for horror enthusiasts.
