EIFF Review 2025: Dead Lover – “The lo-fi sets and sheer sense of fun here were a delight.”

Directed by Grace Glowicki
Starring Grace Glowicki, Leah Doz, Lowen Morrow, Ben Petrie

Another of the wonderfully out-there selection from this year’s Midnight Madness strand, and, oh boy, this one was a total hoot! Using a tiny main cast of four actors, each of whom plays multiple roles (adopting very obvious disguises and accents for maximum comedic effect), and all shot on a set using minimal décor with strategically placed lighting, Glowicki, who co-writes, directs and stars (as the Gravedigger) conjures a delightfully fun romp riffing on Frankenstein.

Check out all of our EIFF coverageThe Gravedigger (Glowicki in brilliant make-up and with an amazing range of facial expressions) is love-lorn – she comes from a long line of grave diggers, and has been doing the job so long no one will come near her because she now has a permanent stink of the grave about her. Even the priest at the burials asks her to keep her distance. Desperate for a lover of her own, how is she to achieve this when nobody can stand being within a few feet of her?

She turns to her books and experiments in her shack in the boneyard, trying various concoctions to disguise her sepulchral scent, to little avail. However when burying the deceased wife of The Widower (Lowen Morrow, playing a comedy cross between Poe and Byron), sister to The Poet (Ben Petrie), the Poet runs off, overcome with grief, straight into the Deep Dark Woods, where, naturally, he is at once attacked by a wolf, which the Gravedigger saves him from. On scenting her unique aroma he is far from repelled, in fact he is intoxicated. A man who has wallowed in all the outrageous and scandalous pleasures, here he has found a new taboo-breaking one, and soon pledges eternal love to the Gravedigger, to her delight.

Sadly, the course of true love never runs smooth, even in an oddball horror-comedy, and returning from a voyage (to have his naughty bits restored to health, no less), his ship is wrecked, and the Poet is lost, only his finger with the ring she gave him saved by a dementedly daft group of fishermen with incomprehensible accents (all played by the main four actors again), who return it to the Gravedigger. She turns to her books and chemicals to try and restore her lover from the finger, leading to, shall we say, a partial success, but not quite what she’s looking for, so digging up bodies it shall be…

The lo-fi sets and sheer sense of fun here were a delight – Glowicki was hoping to be at the Festival, but being heavily pregnant couldn’t travel, so she sent a recorded message to show before the film, and she told everyone not to think about it too much, that it was made to be fun, so just take it that way, and she’s right. If you laughed at Mike Cheslik’s brilliantly bonkers Hundreds of Beavers, this has a similar feel – low budget but with invention making the most of what they have, and a small group just trying to have and make something fun.

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