‘Dead Lover’: How Director Grace Glowicki Pulled Off the Grotesque Indie Romance With Dollar Store Lights, Kiddie Pools and a Single Zoom Lens

variety.com:

Jack Dunn An idea for a movie can come from anywhere, whether it be a song you hear, a painting you see or the sandwich you had for lunch.

In the case of “Dead Lover,” which follows a helplessly lonely (and smelly) gravedigger who reanimates her filth-positive beau using only his detached finger, indie film power couple Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie drew inspiration from community theater, German Expressionism and their friend’s nightmare about his sentient severed penis. “Whenever we were lost and didn’t have ideas, I would ask people if they had any weird dreams lately,” Glowicki explains. “[My friend] told me this dream he had where he looked in the corner of his room and there was a burlap bag, and he knew that inside of it was his castrated penis.

And it was moving the bag. Something about the finger being phallic came from me talking to this guy. Then the question of the movie became, ‘What could happen if you were trying to reanimate your lover, but all you had was their severed finger?'” “Dead Lover” is a charmingly brash romance-horror-comedy meticulously pieced together by stars/writers Glowicki and Petrie, much like the Frankenstein’s Monster the film so cleverly parodies.

Although completely bizarre, it’s a striking meditation on identity, love and self-acceptance. Following its upcoming run at South by Southwest, it could be one of the strongest indie entries of a young 2025.