By JOSHUA POLANSKI
Starring Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Leah Doz
Written by Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie
Directed by Grace Glowicki
Cartuna X Dweck
Most films, good or bad, provoke some kind of visual and aural responses. That’s the point of the multi-sensory art form. At least, this is what movies have done since the advent of the talkie. DEAD LOVER also stinks. This isn’t meant pejoratively. Set in a world surrounded by dead bodies and no running water in sight, Canadian director Grace Glowicki’s follow-up to Tito is a freakish and more randy adaptation of Mary Shelley’s foundational Frankenstein where smell playfully and erotically figures into the story.
Gravedigging is a dirty job, and the gravedigger (Glowicki) here still falls on the stinky side of the profession. Her stench is her defining trait, factoring into how every other character interacts with her. Potentially romantic partners turn in the other direction after getting a whiff until a man mourning his sister, the lover (Ben Petrie, her real-life husband and frequent collaborative partner), finds her smell irresistible. His olfactophilia or scent kink matches her stinky freak. When he dies, the gravedigger concocts a weird potion to bring him back to life Frankenstein–style, but, as with most scientific attempts at resurrection, things don’t go so well.
DEAD LOVER is an extremely theatrical movie. It was shot on 16mm film in black box stages where everything feels tangible and touchable (or smellable). Nothing on screen wasn’t meant to be there and had to be deliberately placed, stretching the artifice of the medium to its maximum in its unique world-building. Even the light finds itself under a dictatorship of direction. The black box approach (and the dollar store lights) also imbues an out-of-world craftiness that recalls the early 20th-century Universal Monster movies and German Expressionism.
Glowicki and Petrie ripen the script with queer angles. In her efforts to bring back her lover, the gravedigger needs a body, and the best body available happens to be the corpse of the lover’s sister. (He also has a yard-long finger that she masturbates with before the body “grows” back.) The new feminine body doesn’t dampen her desire, nor does she change the pronouns she uses for him. The incestual angle adds a different sort of disturbing element to her experiments. The several roles given to every actor also make a playground for gender performance, where everyone brings out their best and campiest David Bowie-esque impersonations.
The “stink-o-vision” scratch-off cards that accompanied the film’s Canadian premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival translated the screen smell to real ones in a way that was almost indelible to the experience of watching the film. The characters talk about and react to diegetic smells more than almost any movie in recent memory. The intense reactions Glowicki primes us to respond to include both the smell of ghost puke and genitalia, to give one an idea of the kind of gross this movie is. Even without the scratch-off cards that the audience can scratch and sniff during a film, the on-screen images are pungent on their own. The textured and funky production design from Becca Brooks Morrin and incredible costume work from Courtney Mitchell are a big reason why DEAD LOVER stinks, smell-o-vision or not.
