Dead Lover Review: A Go-for-Broke Grotesquerie in Full Stink-O-Vision
Grace Glowicki's microbudget Canadian horror film Dead Lover promises fragrant filth in full Stink-O-Vision, delivering a bizarre and morbidly perverse chamber play that pushes boundaries with its unique sensory experience.
An Unusual Cinematic Proposition
If memory serves, the last theatrical release to feature scratch-and-sniff technology was 2011's Spy Kids 4, which invited audiences to experience the gastric emissions of a yapping robot dog. Dead Lover offers more art than fart, though its Stink-O-Vision concept represents just one unusual element in this thoroughly strange cinematic offering.
Writer-director-star Grace Glowicki has crafted a pastiche penny-dreadful plot that persists among the perfumes awaiting your nostrils. The scents include "love," "opium," and "ghost puke," with "milkshake" providing occasional light relief. Delicate sensibilities are strongly advised to stay at home.
A Morbid Tale of Obsession
The film's heroine is odorous by trade, a lovelorn gravedigger of indeterminate age and origin. Glowicki's accent, roaming between Canada, Canvey Island, and Canberra, becomes part of the fun as she portrays a woman driven to extremes after her verse-spouting poet sweetheart (co-writer Ben Petrie) perishes in a shipwreck.
Part-Burke and Hare, part-Victor Frankenstein, she salvages what she can of the corpse in a display of morbid obsession. The script—part-Carry On, part-Ken Russell—grabs both comedy and horror with equal fervor. "I do hope he loves how big my bush has got while he's been away," sighs our protagonist during some wistful botany, showcasing the film's peculiar tone.
Distinctive Filmmaking and Sensory Experience
Even without the scratch-and-sniff component, even before two lesbian nuns wander into the narrative, much of Dead Lover would qualify as ripe indeed. Unmistakably the work of the area of the industry that nurtured Guy Maddin and the singing-rectum musical Zero Patience, the film demands viewers lock on to its specific wavelength.
When audiences successfully tune in, rude chuckles await. Otherwise, the filthier fragrances flooding the cinema stalls will probably prompt awful headaches. This production goes unapologetically for gross and grotesque, bedding right down in its chosen territory without hesitation or apology.
Technical Achievement on a Microbudget
Despite its limited resources, Glowicki frames her go-for-broke performance within striking visual compositions. She finds remarkably suggestive ways to cover budgetary holes, not least through nicely squishy practical effects that enhance the film's visceral impact.
The production represents perhaps too much of an acquired taste—and smell—to appeal to everyone. Yet it remains distinctive, never dull, and—much like its most noxious niffs—difficult to shake from memory once experienced.
Dead Lover arrives in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 March, offering adventurous filmgoers a truly unique cinematic experience that challenges conventional horror tropes while engaging multiple senses in unexpected ways.
