Grace Glowicki’s Sophomore Feature Dead Lover Brings Black Box Theatre to the Big Screen
Grace Glowicki in Dead Lover.
A highlight of my experience at SXSW was catching Dead Lover, directed, starring, and co-written by Toronto’s Grace Glowicki at AFS Cinema. Now, the Canadian actress and filmmaker (born in Edmonton, Alberta!) will share her horror-comedy with local audiences at the Calgary International Film Festival this September.
Glowicki’s surreal and sentimental sophomore feature, Dead Lover, is a horny, hilarious, and unhinged Frankenstein romance about grief, devotion, and going way too far for love. A lonely gravedigger (played by Glowicki) finally meets the man of her dreams, only to lose him in a tragic shipwreck. Devastated, she turns to wild science to bring her lover back to life. The film stars Ben Petrie, Leah Doz, and Lowen Morrow in a variety of roles, mimicking the manic, theatrical style of Monty Python.
Dead Lover.
For Glowicki, the core of the film lies in her love of theatre that developed while she was in university. “I just fell in love with acting, and with the black box theatre in particular. I think that a lot of the visual aesthetics and the spirit of the movie came from this love of theatre that I discovered at McGill.” Her theatrical spirit surfaces across Dead Lover, from its simple yet striking set-pieces, to her tight-knit cast, and the ingenuity of the special effects across the film.
Her theatre troupe that makes up the small cast of the film includes Glowicki’s husband and frequent collaborator, Ben Petrie; Albertan-actor Leah Doz who assisted Glowicki with her “really brilliant mind for story;” and Toronto comedian and puppeteer Lowen Morrow who helpled craft a few of the puppets that appear across the film.
Glowicki grew up watching Mel Brooks, Monty Python, and Dumb and Dumber, a lineage of slapstick and absurdity that acted as fuel for the kind of comedy she wanted to make. “I think body fluids are really funny, I think it's sort of 14-year-old boy humour,” she said, “I just like humour that's pretty stripped down, simple and accessible.”
Her classic comedic inspirations extended towards her “almost” cockney accent used in the film. “I think what I was going for was a cockney accent, but the truth is, I don't really know exactly what that accent is,” she said. “It was coming from my love of make-pretend… it's not so much about the integrity and the specificity of getting all the details right but it's about the joy of performance.”
This philosophy also applies to the final piece of the puzzle, the score which came from U.S. Girls mastermind Meg Remy. Dead Lover marks Remy’s entrance into the art of film scoring, with the pair working together to create the score using pieces from her Remy’s previous albums, unpublished tracks, and even public domain wax cylinder recordings. “We started to realize that we were both really into collaging and so we would just take from a pile and pop it on the movie and see how it felt, and started to make connections together.”
The result is a fantastical scrapbook of theatre, puppetry and gleeful experimentation.
Dead Lover will have its Alberta premiere at the Calgary International Film Festival on September 19. There will be a second screening at the Chinook Cineplex on September 26. Tickets are available at www.ciffcalgary.ca.