For her sophomore feature “Dead Lover,” which premiered in the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, co-writer/director and star Grace Glowicki embraced not only her creepy side, but her smelly side too.
Speaking to IndieWire’s Christian Blauvelt at the IndieWire Studio in Park City, presented by Dropbox, Glowicki said of her character, “She’s a lonely gravedigger who smells so bad of corpses, no one will come near her. And she’s got a lot of emotions, so she’s very funny and angry and vulnerable and tender and all these sort of different things. So she’s kind of this anomaly of feelings and stink.”
To hone this particular strangeness, Glowicki worked with her cast to find the characters best suited for each individual performer, all of whom outside of the writer/director/star play multiple parts. This includes Glowicki’s co-writer, Ben Petrie.
“It was a really unique casting process,” Petrie said of bringing the team together. “Grace brought Lea and Logan and I into the project, and we rehearsed for a while before ever deciding which characters we were going to play. And Grace really allowed all of us to kind of have an organic approach to seeing which characters we gravitated towards. And that made it really fun because it, it allowed us all to make contact with the characters that we were most excited about and let each facet of our inner freak fly accordingly. And it was also cool because it felt like, well, if you screwed up one performance, you had 5 other characters you could have a knock at.”
Elaborating on this process, Glowicki and Petrie’s co-star Lowen Morrow added, “We workshopped these scenes and developed them in studio for months and months. And it was really wonderful, we all jumped in and out of each role so that you could watch and then jump in yourself and then vice versa. So it was a really wonderful process and like, I’m trans masculine and getting to play this sad, badass guy, I can’t imagine another film that anyone would cast me in like that. It just was so fun to get to like — I don’t want to spoil anything, but let’s just say metaphorically kick in some doors.”
Glowicki’s lo-fi Frankenstein riff features a great deal of practical filmmaking tricks and budget-friendly production practices, all of which cast member Leah Doz felt added to their embrace of the film’s overall odd tone, which she hopes viewers will embrace as well.
“There’s something really special about this project and about — I think what Grace creates that is — that allows you to go to extremes,” Doz told IndieWire. “And that’s what each of these characters do is like push extremes of ugliness, of vulgarity, of desperation. And for me as an actor, the fun in being able to do that is something I would love an audience to be like, ‘Oh my God, you can go that far or farther? I don’t need to hold myself together so much.’”
Watch IndieWire’s full video interview with the “Dead Lover” team above.
“Dead Lover” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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