‘Dead Lover’: Rotterdam Review

Dir. Grace Glowicki. Canada. 2025. 86mins

With its mix of lurid camp and twisted romanticism, its embrace of gleefully lo-fi particular results and a twangy electro-retro rating, Grace Glowicki’s Useless Lover, a singular spin on the Frankenstein story, units its sights firmly on cult standing. Glowicki, who co-wrote the screenplay and co-produced the image, stars as a lonely Gravedigger whose goals of romance are stymied by the truth that she stinks of corpses. A short glimpse of happiness with a foppish Lover (Ben Petrie) is abruptly curtailed when he drowns at sea. However Gravedigger is satisfied that love will conquer all – regardless that all that continues to be of her fiance is his ring finger.

Units its sights firmly on cult standing

That is the sort of comedy horror that embraces silliness over scares, though it does boast some visceral, squelchy gore and sensible results. It stays to be seen whether or not there’s sufficient right here to generate the sort of underground break-out success of one thing like A whole lot Of Beavers, but when the movie has a future following its premiere at Sundance and screening at Rotterdam, it is going to be in entrance of well-lubricated audiences at Midnight slots at additional festivals and in rep cinemas.

That is the second directorial enterprise for Glowicki, whose characteristic debut, Tito, premiered at SXSW in 2019. She was beforehand awarded a jury prize at Sundance for her efficiency within the 2016 quick movie Her Pal Adam, which was written and directed by her common collaborator Ben Petrie. Petrie co-wrote Useless Lover and seems in a number of roles, most notably because the Gravedigger’s ill-fated Lover, and his disembodied finger.

Like a lot within the image, Glowicki’s efficiency as Gravedigger veers in direction of the cartoonish. Armed with a spade and a geographically unmoored accent (is she meant to be British? Australian?), Gravedigger is a social pariah – an outcast who’s the topic of scurrilous gossip courtesy of a Greek refrain of catty neighbours (Petrie, Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow, in three of their a number of supporting roles). Her grief on the lack of her lover prompts her to take determined motion: she vegetation his finger in a flower-pot and experiments with potions made out of mashed lizards within the hope of rising him again once more.

She is barely partially profitable: the finger grows to round 4 ft in size and turns into sentient. Realising the short-comings of an attenuated digit as a relationship accomplice, Gravedigger decides to connect the finger to a physique, and settles on that of her Lover’s useless sister, a celebrated opera singer (Doz). Sadly, the reanimated Opera Singer is extra curious about embarking on an erotically charged homicide spree than home bliss with the Gravedigger. Plus there’s the issue of the Opera Singer’s grieving widower (Morrow), who feels compelled to defend the honour of his undead spouse.

There’s a theatrical high quality to the movie’s staging: Glowicki shot on 16mm movie, totally on a soundstage. Characters are spotlit in vivid colors, whereas a lot of the backdrop is shrouded in darkness – a choice which provides the manufacturing the looks of an anarchic cabaret present. Glowicki opts for a glance that embraces artificiality – the Gravedigger’s flaxen wig is clearly and unapologetically nylon, the make up is extravagantly vaudevillian. There’s a perverse kinship with the work of John Waters, one thing that’s acknowledged with a nod to the infamous Pink Flamingos canine faeces scene (“I wish to choose up a chunk of your poo, and eat it like a banana,” says Lover to Gravedigger. Naturally, she is smitten.).

Cartoon sound results and crude particular results are employed all through as a reminder, if one had been wanted, that it is a movie that may barely take itself much less significantly.