Grace Glowicki’s hilarious Dead Lover is a horror-comedy that works far better than it has any right to. With a great script and over the top daft performances, it’s as fun a jaunt of a film as you will find.

A lonely gravedigger (Grace Glowicki) who stinks of corpses finally meets her dream man, Olaf (Ben Petrie), but their whirlwind affair is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, she goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap experiments.

Dead Lover is one of those low-budget, absurd films you can’t help but have a tonne of fun with, but it is almost certainly targeted at a certain brand of loony comedy. We have exaggerated performances aplenty, with the “straight man” role firmly tossed to sea. Which, if we are honest, is something we should expect from Glowicki and husband Ben Petrie. There is an unrepentant delight that fills every second of the film. It’s a delight that carries on into the viewing experience, as you just cannot stop smiling as the film takes another blind step forward into the preposterous.

Glowicki is ludicrously brilliant as the Gravedigger, a woman who just wants to find love and have a family, but is hindered by having the horrible smell of death stained onto her. So alone because of her stench, she talks to the Moon on a nightly basis just to have some form of interaction. So when she does, in fact, interact with others, she is presented as quite eccentric. You are all in on it, though, and that is somehow what makes Dead Lover work so well. Glowicki sells the performance, the character and the situation so well that you simply go along with it, at times gleefully so.

Interestingly for a film, Glowicki has gone for an almost theatre-esque feel with obvious black drapes for the background and very minimal set decoration and lighting. In fact, even in how the cast perform throughout Dead Lover, you can’t help but escape that experimental theatre aesthetic. It works tremendously for a film like this. It could either go massive with its set decoration or as minimal as possible, like here. This allows the film’s comedic, at times frankly daft, nature to shine through.

Glowicki and Petrie’s script is utterly and wonderfully mad. We get such lines as the Gravediggers’ love interest (Petrie in a delightfully terrible wig), uttering “I want to shower in your rot. To feast on your fetid funk,” and well, some lines that should be left to when you watch the film itself. Needless to say, it will leave you gasping with laughter at the absurdity of it all.

Taking the idea of Frankenstein and going multiple levels of weird with it (I mean, I doubt having the idea of growing a dismembered finger like a plant and having sex with it ever came to the mind of Mary Shelley.) That is the weird joy of Dead Lover: you can see all its influences as clear as day, yet it somehow manages to look, feel, and be its own beautiful thing.

Regarding the Stink-O-Vision aspect of Dead Lover, it should add a fun element to an already weird film. Non-conforming bizarre in the best way possible, Dead Lover is a film ready-made for those on the lookout for a good bit of bonkers fun.

Dead Lover will be available in UK Cinemas (in glorious STINK-O-VISION!) from 20th March

★★★ 3/4

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