Rating: NR | Runtime: 84 minutes
Release Date: March 20th, 2026 (Canada/USA)
Studio: Cartuna / Dweck Productions
Director(s): Grace Glowicki
Writer(s): Grace Glowicki & Ben Petrie

Dig deep. Dig hard. Never stop digging.

Grace Glowicki’s sophomore feature Dead Lover (co-written with partner Ben Petrie) is an obvious labor of love crafted with a DIY aesthetic via a darkened soundstage and exaggerated production design, make-up, and gore. Shot on 16mm by experimental filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, most of its special effects are also practically added in post. It’s a lo-fi romantic farce following a lonely gravedigger (Glowicki) desperate to avoid dying alone.

That goal is easier hoped for than assured, however, since her occupation (and dare I say identity) leaves her smelling so odious that no one would ever come close enough for an embrace. The old knitting circle ladies (Petrie, Lowen Morrow, and Leah Doz) laugh and gossip about her delusion while she attempts to concoct a perfume to mask her scent. Her first attempt at seducing the local priest (Doz) fails. Her next target … surprisingly proves responsive.

He is a poet (Petrie) and the brother of the gravedigger’s latest corpse—an opera singer (Doz) mourned by her swashbuckling husband (Morrow). He’s a romantic whose words about love give the gravedigger pause … long enough to watch him run into the woods too distraught to realize wolves on are his tail. Their romance is therefore born out of her heroics in saving him. And, rather than disgusted, he becomes aroused by her scent. It’s two weirdoes yumming each other’s yuck.

Long story short: their passionate night together ends with a note wherein he promises to return after dealing with medical issues preventing him from giving her the brood of children she so craves. We learn about her mercurial emotions as a result and ultimately find her desperation reaching a fever pitch upon the poet’s tragic demise. With only his ring finger returned to her, the gravedigger decides to grow his body back from it like a lizard does its tail.

As you can tell from the repeated actor names above, Dead Lover‘s entire cast consists of just four principal players. Glowicki portrays the gravedigger (alongside her director duties) while Petrie, Morrow, and Doz play the rest—regardless of gender. And since it’s all shot in-studio with isolated spotlights (an intentional decision to lean into the minimalism of “black-box theatre and German expressionist cinema”) cuts and composites easily double them up.

The finished product won’t be for everyone due to its silent era aesthetic, humor hinging on repetitive escalation, and yearning to be as idiosyncratic as humanly possible with performances that are both intentionally broad (Morrow’s widower is fantastic) and/or absurd (Doz’s opera singer, eventually reanimated, channels Vincent D’Onofrio from Men in Black). So, use the finger’s “growing” scene as your tonal litmus test for what follows. Do you laugh or groan?

Despite my reaction being the former, I’d be lying if I didn’t say my overall feeling was more appreciation than enjoyment. These types of experimental productions aren’t the easiest for me to push through, so I definitely found watching at home to be a luxury with the ability to pause and take brief breaks to rest my eyes. Its ingenuity, on-screen excitement, and comical depravity ensured that I was never at risk of stopping altogether, though.

I still wanted to find out where it all would lead because every new plot progression was hardly what I expected it to be. Glowicki and company are constantly pushing the envelope by jumbling up identities and desires until even the characters are confused about where their love resides and with whom. Bodies, minds, rage, and libidos become so swapped and misdirected that bloodshed ends up being the only outcome.

So, rather than rebirth simply being the solution to reversing death, death itself becomes a necessary evil to achieve that rebirth. There’s probably a “Ship of Theseus” quandary hiding underneath the genre trappings too as the usual abstract representation of a person being their soul gets replaced by their ring finger (its veins said to lead to the heart) instead. That appendage is where our love resides. The rest of us is merely the vessel holding it in place.

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Grace Glowicki in DEAD LOVER; courtesy of Cartuna x Dweck.