Toronto-based filmmaker Grace Glowicki is no stranger to the bizarre. Recently she, along with husband Ben Petrie, starred in the schlocky, romantic gothic horror Honey Bunch which premiered at Berlin in 2025. Her feature debut, Tito, was an offbeat comedy where she herself played an agoraphobic man whose world is shaken by the arrival of a cheerful intruder (Petrie) which Indiewire described as an “experimental, post-apocalyptic nightmare”. Similar phrasing could be parsed to her sophomore feature Dead Lover: a silly, horny, unhinged low-fi genre mish-mash, where 2-D animated lightning flashes on the screen and four actors, playing multiple roles, traverse across sound stages and spotlights like they’re an act in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The film itself is about a lonely, rotten-toothed gravedigger (Glowicki) who craves intimacy, but can’t find love due to the stench of corpses lingering on her. That is until a man (Petrie, in an amusingly unbecoming wig) finds her foul stench arousing, telling the Gravedigger that he wants to “lick your stink, taste your foulness”. After tragedy befalls the new couple, Dead Lover transforms into a riff on Frankenstein as the Gravedigger takes the severed finger of her lover’s corpse and reanimates her lover in an act of defiant love.
Dead Lover is having its UK premiere at the 78th Edinburgh Film Festival, where critic Connor Lightbody caught up with Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie over Zoom.
The Interview with Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie of Dead Lover
[Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.]
Connor Lightbody: So first of all, let’s talk Dead Lover. How did the concept for it first come about?
Grace Glowicki: I think it came about from wanting to make a super playful comedy. I love Mel Brooks movies, Monty Python movies. So we just kind of wanted to make a really fun movie that still had emotional grounding, but sort of paid homage to these sort of slapstick comedies that we really loved. I brainstormed the movie orally with four different friends. One was Ben, where we just sort of spitballed ideas for a couple years which is where the Grave Digger character came about. Then Ben and I would take all the juice from those two years of oral story building and I would pen the actual screenplay and kind of structure it. So it came from a few different places.
Connor Lightbody: I am so glad you mentioned Monty Python as there is a real sense of Monty Python to it. I also got a sense of Horrible Histories, if you’re familiar?
Grace Glowicki: No, I haven’t
Connor Lightbody: So it’s a children’s TV show in the UK where they reenact…well…horrible histories but they do it in kind of a slapstick way. It is similarly low-fi like Dead Lover except a lot less nudity and a lot less graphic of course.
Grace Glowicki: [hahaha]
Connor Lightbody: But I’d recommend checking it out! Once the film hits the UK, that’ll be the point of reference for a lot of people my age I imagine. But apart from Monty Python and no doubt things like SNL and that kind of sketch comedy, what were the more visual references and inspirations?
Ben Petrie: One of the first things I remember Grace referencing to me was the visual of Iggy Pop, on stage, in a spotlight performing. I remember her saying something like “I don’t need anything other than the performer in a spotlight”. Because what is going on with his body and his face is interesting enough visually. I remember live performance was a big part of it. Cemetery Man became an inspiration.
Grace Glowicki: Yeah, the Rupert Everett movie Cemetery Man became sort of a late reference. We actually learned about it in the makeup chair on the set. But what Ben is referencing is where the inspiration for the aesthetic of the film came from, which was low budget theater productions or music shows where it really was just a performer in a spotlight. I love performance so what if we just place that on a pedestal, aesthetically, the way it is when you go see a cheap black box play. It is just actors and a few props in the spotlight. We were really kind of jazzed about that sort of punk DIY super minimal aesthetic that in theater live shows all the time.
Connor Lightbody: Your film is premiering at Edinburgh Film Festival where the Edinburgh Fringe is happening right now. So the film fits in perfectly as productions like this are happening across the city right now.
Connor Lightbody: A few lines stuck out for me, such as “lick your stink”, “taste your foulness” and a line about eating poop like a banana?
Grace Glowicki: Ben wrote that one.
Ben Petrie: Yeah, that line about picking up a piece of your poop and eating it like a banana was the first line I ever proposed to Grace that my character should say. I said to her while we were driving, that I wanted to pick up a piece of your poo and eat it like a banana
Connor Lightbody: Oh wow.
Grace Glowicki: That was kind of a guide from there. It remains the best line in the movie we think
Connor Lightbody: It was definitely one of the standouts. I was quite moved by the passage “you’re not a metaphor for beauty. You are beauty.” I was quite taken by that and empowered by it.
Grace Glowicki: Yes, I love that too
Connor Lightbody: I had a blast watching Dead Lover and I did it through a laptop and some headphones. I can only imagine how great it would’ve been in a theater. You’ve experienced the film with an audience at Sundance, have you experienced it anywhere else? And what has been the best audience response so far?
Grace Glowicki: Yeah, so we’ve been to South By Southwest too. After Sundance, we did Rotterdam, which was amazing. Rotterdam were a really game audience, they seemed really into the weird if it. So it was really well received there. And then South by Southwest was amazing too. Any place where the audiences are known for having a little more of a weird sensibility, the film seems to play quite well.
Ben Petrie: We’re optimistic that we can do a screening in a couple of weeks where we are doing it as a scratch and sniff edition of the film.
Connor Lightbody: Oh my god!
Ben Petrie: And the midnight madness TIFF premiere is screening at this theater called the Royal Alexander in Toronto, which is a 1200-seater theatre so it’s going to be a clash of high art and very low art with bringing in the smello-vision
Connor Lightbody: How is the smell-o-vision thing working?
Grace Glowicki: We’re just designing it now, but we’re modeling it off how John Waters’ Polyester did it, where it’s a printed out card with twelve little scratch and sniff windows. So during the film, a number will flash at a certain point and then you correspond to your card, scratch it and smell. And we have some nasty smells.
Connor Lightbody: Oh, I can only imagine. You’ve got four cast members playing multiple roles. How did you go about choosing who plays what?
Grace Glowicki: Yeah, so I kind of just left it up to them and trusted them. We all rehearsed each of the characters as a way to not get too attached to anything and to really build the theater troupe of it all. So every actor was in rehearsal, rotating through different roles, and then maybe a month before shooting I asked them, “what are you gravitating towards?”. And they happened to all pick different lead characters and then it was easy to divvy out things like the gossips or the sailors because there just were three of those core groups. So everyone just gradually found their way to characters and found their groove.
Connor Lightbody: Huge fan of the sound choices here. It’s wacky, it’s schlocky, the score is great and the sound effects are almost Looney Toons-esque at times.
Grace Glowicki: Totally. I really love sound design and because of the slapstick nature of comedy cartoons, they were a perfect reference for how to have fun with sound effects. So early in the edit, me and the editor would just be throwing sound effects at the piece and we’re just super delighted at how fun and how well sound effects worked with the thing. So we just threw as much sound effects as we could at it.
Connor Lightbody: and on the score, how was it working with composer Meg Remy and her band U.S. Girls?
Grace Glowicki: We basically approached the score as a collage. We were using public domain wax cylinder recordings, that were cleaned up by my sound mixer, as an aspect of the collage. Then we’re also using rejected scraps from unreleased songs from her first three albums, then she had one new tune for us that kind of became the theme song. So we would throw different pieces of sound at the piece and see what stuck. It’s kind of a collage of these four different kinds of sound.
Connor Lightbody: As great as the musical choices are, I found myself completely enraptured by your command of visual language. Dead Lover feels, and looks like it could be a silent film, particularly through the use of 16 millimeter. It’s striking. It’s in your face. It’s a real visual treat. How much priority do you place on the image itself? You were saying that it was a pedestal for the performance but the image itself is as striking as the performances are
Grace Glowicki: Yeah, we needed a really strong cinematographer who was a very strong visual artist. I needed an artist to shoot the movie because it’s such a visually minimal concept, where it really is just an actor in a spotlight for a lot of the movie. I knew I needed someone that could really paint with their cinematography. So Rhayne Vermette is the cinematographer and she’s just so amazing at shooting on a 16 millimeter. It is like she paints with different colors of light. The visual of the film and all of that is really important to me, but I knew I needed it to be so striking in order for the rest of it to work as it was so stripped back.
Ben Petrie: I would say that it is a very low budget movie and there were about a hundred temptations a day presented by the budget to shoot digitally because it would have been much easier to do. But it became apparent to Grace pretty early on that 16mm had to be the number one thing that was protected in any draft of the budget. Anything else that was dealing with the limitations of the production had to work around 16mm as a known constant because protecting the textural elements of the film was existential to the project.
Connor Lightbody: Oh I completely agree and I’m glad you did. I don’t know if it would’ve worked on digital. It needs that texture and grain. We touched on budget briefly there. Your debut feature, Tito, was partially financed through Kickstarter. How did Dead Lover come to be in terms of funding? How do you even begin to pitch something like Dead Lover to any kind of financier?
Grace Glowicki: Well, you get lucky and you’re Canadian because our government funds the arts. The bulk of the budget of this film is from a grant called the Telefilm Talent to Watch Grant. They spread a couple hundred thousand dollars to first or second time filmmakers so I’m just very lucky to be one of them. Most of this is arts grants from Canada, so I didn’t have to pitch it as a project. We have an American production company on board that came in with a bit of money and a couple private investors, but the bulk of it was just awarded based on artistic merit and cultural relevance. Not on its ability to be worth anything in the marketplace. Because of that, I knew I could be really experimental. This could be maybe one of my last times when I don’t have to be so thoughtful about a project making money. So I took the opportunity to be kind of bold and experimental.
Connor Lightbody: I would think bold and experimental are very apt terms to attach to Dead Lover. You’re saying that this might be one of your last projects where you don’t have to think about money. What do you have in the pipeline that you think may be thinking about being marketable and general audience friendly?
Grace Glowicki: Yeah, so I’m just starting to try to write it now but I keep saying to Ben that I want to make a movie that looks like a movie and functions like a movie. I feel like I’ve made these two very experimental comedies that cinephiles love, but my mom is like, what is this?
Connor Lightbody: Oh yeah, I tried to explain Dead Lover to my family as they were asking me what the film’s about and I was just like yeah it’s about a grave digger who stinks and it’s sorta franksteiny. It’s lovely but also
Ben Petrie: There’s this guy, he wants to eat poo.
Connor Lightbody: [hahaha] yeah! I’m so glad that arts funding like this still exists. I live in the UK and we’ve had a lot of the funding stripped back for a lot of the arts, so getting something like that is quite rare here.
Connor Lightbody: You work as the director here, but you are also the lead actor. How do you find directing yourself and where do you find oversight in your performance because the buck stops with you?
Grace Glowicki: Yeah, honestly, I don’t know if I could do it without Ben. Ben is very much my second set of eyes and I often just tell him to direct me in this scene? I need a leader to get through the scene sometimes and just trust Ben so much. I work so closely with him when he directs himself, so I’m used to providing that support to him when he’s directing and acting in his own films. So yeah, I think the answer to that is Ben.
In a more general sense, I can only do it when I feel I have a team around me that I can trust to ask their opinions and say, “do you guys think we have it?”. I don’t have any pride about asking for help from my department heads. I try to collaborate in a style that encourages people to feel like they have authority over the piece, so that I can bump up against it when I need my own guidance. So yeah, that’s the secret.
Ben Petrie: I remember the other night we were watching through the film to take a look at the scratch and sniff timing. It was interesting that at one point, during a Grave Digger monologue, Grace had said she didn’t remember going through that experience. I do feel like to some extent you showed up on Tito and Dead Lover with the creative idea for the characters and what you wanted to express with the characters. In pre-production, you’re charging them up as you’re coming up with the character and scenes, and then by the time you get to set, you basically just press on the pimple and the pus squeezes out.
Connor Lightbody: There’s a lot of queer transgression in the film, from a perspective of sexuality and of gender. Can you talk more about what your intentions were and what you want to convey?
Grace Glowicki: I was feeling personally inspired by the freedom that you see in Monty Python and SNL, and in comedy troupes and theater troupes in Old Shakespeare plays where you’re limited by the amount of actors you have, so you more freely allow yourself out of necessity. I always thought there was a real sort of joy and humor in how they play different genders, different ages. There’s just a freedom in stepping into different identities. I just thought there’s always been such a joy and a natural transgression to that. That really appealed to me. It wasn’t so much a political choice as just I think a playful comedic, performative joy.
Connor Lightbody: So you’ve got Honey Bunch coming out soon. For me, Honey Bunch feels like the A-Side to Dead Lover’s B-Side, particularly since Honey Bunch and Dead Lover are both roughly about the undying everlasting feeling of love. It doesn’t seem a coincidence when the two of you are recently married. How much impact does your relationship with one another have on your art and your individual processes?
Ben Petrie: [to Grace] Do you think our marriage has more influence on our art or our art has more influence on our marriage?
Grace Glowicki: Oh my gosh, honestly, it’s so hard to answer. The line are so blurred that I would say it’s an infinity loop that feeds itself. I can’t imagine being married to Ben and not working with him, so I can’t imagine whatever the inverse of that statement is. We met being attracted to each other’s artistic sense and attracted to each other as people. So it’s just been the foundation of everything in the relationship. [To Ben] What do you think?
Ben Petrie: Oh, I think you said it perfectly.
Grace Glowicki: Honestly, it’s the most challenging and most wonderful gift of my life working and being married to Ben. It’s really quite unusual what we’re doing.
Connor Lightbody: That is such a lovely answer
Grace Glowicki: We wish we were there in Edinburgh for the premiere but I’m eight months pregnant so we couldn’t travel
Connor Lightbody: Oh, congratulations!
Grace Glowicki: If it wasn’t the case, we would be in Edinburgh. We really wanted to go.
Connor Lightbody: No, absolutely and thank you for taking this time to talk to me. I look forward to seeing what reactions come from Dead Lover’s premiere, and to Honey Bunch, which is one of my favorite films of the year and I can’t wait for more people to see it.
Dead Lover will premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the official Edinburgh site for the title.
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