Review of 'Dead Lover': a tremendously creative feminist immersion in gothic territory

“I want to lick your stench… I want to taste your filth… I want to bathe in your rot… I want to revel in your fetid funk.”

Have more romantic sweets ever appeared on screen? Scripted by Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie (partners in life and on film), these words of seduction are music to the ears of a lonely gravedigger (Glowicki), who has been formulating a perfume to cover his corpse stench. What she discovers is that the right person will love her exactly how she smells, and she'll discover that she's not so pheromone-challenged after all.

Glowicki's second feature, “Dead Lover,” sometimes featured in “Stink-O-Vision,” is one of those completely unique phenomena that we can thank Telefilm Canada for subsidizing (see also: the Cronenberg family's work, Matt Johnson's current “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” and many more).

She co-writes, directs and stars in this wonderfully stylized and wonderfully crafted project, beautifully designed with horribly gothic sets by production designer Becca Morrin and art director Ashley Devereux. The combination of intentional artifice combined with deep emotion is reminiscent of other Canadian auteurs like Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin (“The Twentieth Century”), but Glowicki’s film also exists within another lineage: the feminist Frankenstein film.

The film begins with a quote from Mary Shelley: “There is something at work in my soul that I do not understand.” Her 1818 novel “Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus” has always been a feminist text (despite Guillermo del Toro's cruder adaptation), fighting against the terrifying power of creating life and how close it is to death. Feminist filmmakers have drawn on these inherent themes of the book; the most recent and loudest example is Maggie Gyllenhaal's “The Bride.” But “Dead Lover” is closer to Laura Moss’s modern medical version of “birth/rebirth,” and even closer to Zelda Williams’ cute, poppy “Lisa Frankenstein,” in which a young seamstress sews up a reanimated groom.

Our gravedigger speaks to us, and to the moon, about his heart's desire in charming cockney rhyming slang. Their hopes are quite simple and conventional: true love for life and a family. After much rejection, he finally finds his lover (Petrie) in the cemetery, saving him from a ferocious beast while mourning his late opera singer sister (Leah Doz). After the couple consummates their fragrant lust, the Gravedigger is ready to settle down right away.

To make his dreams come true, Lover travels to Europe to receive fertility treatments, where he drowns on a boat, the only thing left of him is a finger given to him by fishermen. Our enterprising gravedigger, a true woman of science, designs a lizard elixir and regenerates the finger into a long tentacle that eventually demands a body. What better option than his own sister? But when their wild new creature (Doz) comes to life, all hell breaks loose, summoning the sister's jealous and heartbroken widower (Lowen Morrow) into an unfortunate love triangle (or square?).

Glowicki is a terrific filmmaker and brings together her small group to execute this unique project. Petrie, Doz and Morrow play multiple roles, including a gossipy Greek chorus and the band of merry fishermen (a surprising variety of Canadian accents really are on display). His commitment to his singular vision never wavers, but as an actor, Glowicki is truly amazing. Covered in Halloween makeup and illuminated with a variety of colored gels, Glowicki evokes something primal, pure and deeply moving about the lengths one can go to for love, a screech from deep within.

With a dream-pop soundtrack by US Girls that would be right at home on an episode of “Twin Peaks,” “Dead Lover,” in all its stinky, sexy, queer, grotesque glory, is one of the most grotesque and beautiful movies about love I've ever seen. This one is for the horny and desperate goth in all of us.