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Part low-budget DIY theatre, part “Frankenstein,” part Kenneth Anger, and yet wholly its own creation, writer-director-star Grace Glowicki’s sophomore film, the expressionistic romantic horror comedy “Dead Lover,” is ready to teach you how to let go. The film stars Glowicki as a lonely, ostracized gravedigger who finally meets the love of her life, only to have their affair end abruptly after he drowns at sea. Heartbroken, the gravedigger attempts to resurrect her, um dead lover, through a series of scientific experiments involving lizards and a corpse. The result is an extremely silly, yet melancholic, examination of the lengths we go to hold on to our loved ones.
Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Glowicki moved to Toronto after graduating from McGill University. In Toronto, she began acting in indie films like Rebecca Addelman’s “Paper Year,” Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley’s “Strawberry Mansion,” Mary Dauterman’s “Booger,” and Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s “Honey Bunch.” In 2016, she won a special jury award at 2016 Sundance Film Festival for her performance in Ben Petrie’s “Her Friend Adam.” That same year she was named a rising star by the Toronto International Film Festival. Her debut feature as a director, “Tito,” which was shot in just seven days, premiered at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival where it won the Adam Yauch Hornblower Award for its unique vision. Glowicki’s singular performance in the film was later dubbed by The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody as “an instant classic of acting.”
In 2020, Glowicki received a grant from Telefilm to develop her second film, “Dead Lover.” A truly collaborative effort, she conceived of the film’s absurdist concept while brainstorming with a group of friends, then re-teamed with her creative and life partner Ben Petrie to write the film’s script. Petrie also appears in the film, along with Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow, with all three playing multiple roles. Shot over the course of sixteen days by acclaimed Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette, who filmed on 16mm using an Arri SR3 and Bolex, the comedy takes the premise “how far would you go to bring back the love of your life?” to its most absurd extremes. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival as part of the Midnight selection. Writing out of its world premiere, Robert Daniels called it “a loony, delirious dark romantic film with a handmade quality.” “Dead Lover” went on to screen at a myriad of festivals around the globe, including at SXSW, Rotterdam, and as part of the Midnight Madness program at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
For this month’s Female Filmmakers in Focus column, RogerEbert.com spoke to Glowicki over Zoom about chasing the high of making your friends laugh, the joys of DIY filmmaking, embracing mistakes, the comic genius of Lina Wertmüller, and how arts funding in Canada has helped a new wave of idiosyncratic filmmakers find their voice.
There was something wrong with my initial screener and it didn’t have the dialogue audio, just the music, so I thought at first you had made a silent film. It worked well, until I realized it wasn’t supposed to be a silent film. [laughs]
The composer, Meg Remy [aka U.S. Girls] actually did that as an exercise when she was writing the score. She watched the whole film silently, and she said the same thing to me. She was like, “It works as a silent film, bro.”
It absolutely does. I was following it. I was in it.
I love that.
You’re part of that wave of filmmakers who are all about getting a group of friends together and DIY making a film. I’d love to hear your ethos of creating from that place.
There’s something special about working with friends. Making movies is so hard, so it’s great if you can do it with people you love. My whole thing is I’m chasing this high you get from when you’re making something with someone and you’re just trying to make each other giggle. That, for me, that’s like a drug and I’m addicted to it. Like when you see actors break on “SNL”. Whatever that is, I’m chasing it. So, I like to pull together people who I think are really funny and really smart, and then just build a world together. That’s my favorite thing to do. I just try to keep doing that.
You’ve said this film came out of you riffing with a group of friends and landing on building a world around a gravedigger. What did you find so fascinating about a gravedigger?
I think it was because when I thought of gravediggers, I almost couldn’t think of a woman gravedigger. I thought that was so interesting that my imagination couldn’t even picture what that would look like. And that was a sign to myself that that was an interesting idea, to have a female gravedigger. Then, of course, the more you think about the thematics of a gravedigger, it’s like women can give birth, they have their periods, there’s all this blood, there’s all this dying that’s happening inside them cyclically every month, and so, we’re closer to death than men in some way. So it was interesting to think about a woman occupying this space.
Your film opens with a Mary Shelley quote, and the film is a bit of a riff on Frankenstein, but it’s not a pure adaptation. In the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of discussion about what is a pure adaptation, and whether you are allowed to claim the work as an inspiration if it’s too far removed. I would love to hear your thoughts on the influence Frankenstein had on this film, and how it came in, what you took, and what you left, etc.
For a while, I was embarrassed to admit that I’ve actually never read Frankenstein. But I was okay with that, because I was interested in the fact that everyone knows Frankenstein as a story and a concept; it is baked into pop culture, and I’ve been inundated since I was little with all these different interpretations of Frankenstein and receiving all this different messaging of what this story was. I thought that that was a cool vantage point from which to make a Frankenstein story; a Frankenstein riff from all these different tidbits that I’d soaked up just from being alive in this moment of time. So that was my approach.
The movie actually revealed itself to be a Frankenstein movie later in the process. I definitely didn’t set out to make a Frankenstein movie, but it came from this core character trait of somebody who, even in the face of death, can’t let something go, can’t let someone go. So it almost came from more of a “Re-Animator” place at first, but then it clicked into Frankenstein, which I think just goes to show you that that story has some pretty timeless themes in it that are still relevant today, and are relevant even if you haven’t read the source material.
I love what you said about being obsessed with something and just not being able to let it go. And this is the most extreme version of that. Your film is very comedic, but it has an undercurrent of melancholy to it that I found very moving, despite the silliness. Can you talk a bit about that melancholic throughline?
The movie comes from working through my own anxious attachment style, essentially. So the movie actually comes from a real place in my heart. I like to take little problems I’m working on and magnify them and exaggerate them, to really look at them. So of course, I’m not like the character of Gravedigger. I wouldn’t reanimate a dead loved one. But, I relate to her in that I have felt that feeling when you feel someone pulling away from you, and you want to grasp them, and you want to hold them, and you want to control them and keep them close to you, and you don’t want them to leave. That’s the emotional core of this movie. The moral of the movie is, if you love it, let it go. Of course, Gravedigger doesn’t know how to do that, so that’s why she has a tragic end.
To your point about it being relevant to what’s going on today. I actually just read an article about death bots.
What are those?
They are chat bots where you upload audio that you have of a loved one, or before you die you can upload it yourself for your loved ones, and then people can “talk” to their loved ones forever. I found that deeply disturbing.
That’s like a Cronenberg movie. It’s like “The Shrouds.”
I read that piece right after I watched your film, and I was like, I don’t think this ends well.
No, I don’t think so either.
Your film is really a four-person show with so many different people playing different characters. How did you develop the characters for each person? What was that process like?
It was so cool to watch people play multiple characters. It comes from my love of seeing comedy troops do that on SNL and Monty Python. There’s such joy in a single actor playing multiple different roles, or a small team performing a world of characters. It was very fun.
The rehearsal process really bonded us as a comedy troupe. We all played each of the different characters, so during the rehearsal process we weren’t attached to a specific character. So Ben [Petrie] would play Gravedigger, I would play Gravedigger, Leah [Doz] would play Lover, Ben would play Lover, and we would cycle through all the characters in effort to develop them as a team instead of as individuals. I think it broke what in a normal movie is a territorialism and an ego identification between an actor and a character; it allowed the world to be ours as a team. That was wonderful for getting basically four brains to inhabit a character and see what they saw through the eyes of that character. It was wonderful for development. Then, when we got closer to the shoot, I just asked the actors which characters they were gravitating towards the most. And sure enough, they all picked different characters. No one was competing for the same character. It just naturally fell into place.
The production design and makeup and costumes are so important to the creation of who these characters are and the world they inhabit. Can you talk a bit about collaborating with your artisans on that?
The production designer was Becca Morrin, who also did “Strawberry Mansion” as well. I had worked with her on that and saw her make these fantastic worlds sometimes just using painted cardboard or recycled milk jugs. Watching her take whatever material she had access to and turn them into these expressive DIY landscapes was amazing. So I knew working in this way, on “Dead Lover,” she would be perfect to create the world with so little. I really didn’t want to have any background on set. I wanted everything to fall into blackness, like it would in a black box theater. She totally ran with it and nailed the DIY theater aesthetic.
The cinematographer, Rhayne Vermette, is an extraordinarily talented woman. I had seen her film “St. Anne.” Some of her shots in that movie, and her use of color to light characters, and the way she used darkness. . . I just thought, “Oh, my God, this woman is just painting with light and darkness.” So when she agreed to do the movie, I knew the combination of her and Becca would totally elevate this idea I had for making a stripped back theater movie. They nailed it.
I think everyone who worked on the movie was pretty excited, because we could go so big and so expressive. Most of us in film are used to working in a realistic space, but I’m big on imperfections, too. So we kept saying continuity is for losers. You couldn’t make a mistake, in a way, because the mistakes were welcomed and the cracks and the veneers were welcomed.
Were there any lo-fi films you looked to as a reference, or were you just purely translating your experience in theatre to film?
It’s mostly my experience in theatre, but then retroactively, I would watch Kenneth Anger films and notice some similarities there, and, of course, Rhayne’s films. I think part of it is, as an actor, I struggle with continuity, and I struggle with being consistent. So it’s in some ways, a rebellion against the pressure I feel in other people’s films to maintain some kind of consistency, and then I can sell it as a conscious celebration of imperfections and cracks, but also performance itself.
I’m not terribly interested in trying to create a perfect illusion of realism. I don’t find that super interesting as an actor or a filmmaker. It’s why I like Nicolas Cage. I like when people are big and inconsistent. We’ve been reading Sam Shepard plays, and those characters often switch into each other and out of each other. There’s something so cool about the spontaneity of that that I prefer, I guess.
It feels like there’s this whole generation of thirty-something Canadians making very expressive, idiosyncratic cinema. I wonder if you feel as if you’re a group working in a class, or if you’re all independent, but somehow it’s coming together from an outsider perspective, like a class of filmmakers?
I don’t know why exactly it’s happening. I love Matthew [Rankin]’s work. He’s been really supportive of my work. I think Guy Maddin coming from Winnipeg, and both Rhayne and Matthew coming from Winnipeg, and me hiring these Winnipeg people to come make this movie. There’s something about the tradition around Winnipeg and film and Guy Maddin that I’m sure is part of it. But I also think it’s because the Canadian government is amazing at funding filmmakers to make these projects. I think there’s space for us to be a little more expressive, because we’re getting support from these arts councils and Telefilm to make these cultural art projects. I think that’s part of why these voices are able to emerge with so much artistic freedom. It’s a big testament to the government.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the restrictions of low budget filmmaking affects your creative process.
The first film I made, “Tito,” I made in seven days. I kept wanting to make it in four days, but everyone said no, you need at least seven days. I still want to make a four day feature, because there’s just something so thrilling about putting yourself inside limitations. You’re trapped and you have to find your way out. What are the thoughts and the ideas and creativity that will come from those restrictions? It tantalizes me. When you can do absolutely anything, you just end up doing nothing at all.
Liking restrictions has been so helpful for me in the context of indie film. That first feature that I shot, I couldn’t get any money from anywhere. I had to cobble together, I think it was $12,000 from my filmmaker friends to shoot that movie. We shot it with just two people in a house. Being interested in working within restrictions has allowed me to continue as an indie filmmaker and to slowly climb my way up. Because, you do start with nothing, so that is the ultimate restriction. I always say I would just like to have rails. If I know what my rails are, then I’m good. If I feel like I don’t have rails as an actor or filmmaker, I tend to panic.
So my intention for “Dead Lover,” was that you can’t make a mistake, and if it’s fun, that’s what we have to follow. My restriction for this film was that I wanted to be collaborative and to have fun and to prove to myself that we could have a really good time making a movie, and that would be worth something. Also, of course having no background on the set and shooting on 16mm with very little money was also a restriction for me and the actors. Restriction was really baked into the ethos of this film.
Filming on 16mm means you can’t just shoot coverage and call it good. You have to be really intentional with your shots. Shooting on 16mm can sometimes seem like just an aesthetic choice, but I think here it was really a world building choice and an artistic choice that allows for precision, not necessarily perfection, but precision in your filmmaking.
We decided to work without a monitor too. So we were shooting the movie blind. We had to trust each other. That was another restriction. We had to just trust each other, trust our eyes on the day. I had to trust when Rhayne said she had something good framed and I didn’t have time to look at it. That restriction was so wonderful for throwing us back to a way of filmmaking that used to exist before monitors were invented, where people did just have to tacitly and physically feel things out, and it bonds the crew in an interesting way, and focuses everyone in an interesting way. I love stuff like that.
Were there any other women who make films who have either influenced you in the past, the present, whatever, or if there’s just some film directed by women that you really love and you would like to shout it out so people watch it?
The poster that hangs above my desk is the poster for Věra Chytilová’s “Daisies.”
The greatest.
I’m also obsessed with Lina Wertmüller. “Swept Away” is one of my favorite movies ever. She’s so, so, so amazing. So those two are coming to mind.
I love Lina Wertmüller. “Love and Anarchy” is my favorite of hers.
Those two Italian actors she always worked with, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, were so good. I really love those movies.
I can feel Lina Wertmüller in your comedy, actually, because everything she does is a little heightened, a little ridiculous.
Yeah, her characters are full fledged, like clowns.
That’s why I love asking that question, because, I wouldn’t immediately see it, but then you say it now I can see it. I have to rewatch “Dead Lover” and think about Lina Wertmüller.
I love that you see it. That’s a huge compliment.
Lina Wertmüller, I feel like, as a filmmaker was so influential for so long and has been a little bit forgotten now. I think because her films are harder to access. It heartens me to hear when people mention her films, because she’s one of the greatest.
Yeah, she’s amazing. She was the first woman to direct a film nominated for Best Picture, which is pretty amazing.
Her film “Seven Beauties” truly deserved it too. That film is intense.
It’s a wild movie. I just watched that movie.
Definitely one of those movies that the line that she walks between comedy and melancholy and horror is just sex. It’s a lot.
It really is. She’s amazing.
Do you have any parting thoughts you hope viewers will take from your film?
Honestly, if you love it, let it go.
“Dead Lover” will be released on March 20th, 2026.
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