I’ve always had a soft spot for low-budget films. There’s something refreshing about watching a movie where the filmmakers clearly had more passion than money. When you strip away the studio budgets and the CGI polish, what you’re left with is pure creativity. Sometimes that creativity leads to something brilliant. Sometimes it leads to something wonderfully bizarre. Either way, I respect the hustle, even if my critiques sometimes don’t convey that.
Part of that appreciation comes from personal experience.
Back in the early 2010s, I wrote and shot a low-budget horror film of my own, and it taught me quickly what independent filmmaking is really like. You get incredible freedom to bring your vision to life, but that freedom comes with serious constraints when the budget is basically whatever you can scrape together from your paycheck, after taxes and life. You learn to improvise, ask for favors and turn everyday objects into props and special effects.
Because of that experience, I tend to approach strange, little indie films like Dead Lover with a little more understanding of just how much work it takes to make them happen.
Dead Lover is a comedy from writer-director Grace Glowicki and co-writer Ben Petrie. In the film, Glowicki plays a lonely gravedigger who dreams of finding her one true love and having a family. Unfortunately, her line of work and her rather unfortunate body odor make romance difficult.
After the funeral of a beloved opera singer (Leah Doz), she meets a strange poet named Lover (Petrie), the singer’s brother. The two quickly form an odd connection and fall head over heels for one another. But when the gravedigger talks about her dream of having children, Lover leaves to travel abroad for fertility treatments. Tragically, he dies on the voyage home.
Devastated by grief, the gravedigger turns to science in an attempt to resurrect him using the only part of his body that was recovered: his finger. Surprisingly, the experiment works… but Lover isn’t quite the man he used to be. The question then becomes whether love can conquer death, especially when the widower of the opera singer (Lowen Morrow) comes back into the picture.
Dead Lover was reportedly made for less than $350,000, and you can feel that scrappy independent spirit throughout the production. Three of the four cast members play multiple roles, which gives the entire film the vibe of a community theater production brought to the screen. Many of the sets are extremely simple, often little more than minimal props placed against dark backdrops that resemble the empty stage space of a local playhouse.
Even the makeup follows that stripped-down approach. Instead of elaborate prosthetics or heavy effects work, the film relies mostly on shadowing and hand-drawn wrinkles to create different characters. It’s intentionally simple, but it fits the handmade aesthetic the filmmakers are clearly leaning into.
That theatrical style allows the actors to constantly transform throughout the film. One moment Ben Petrie is Lover, dancing around in the gravedigger’s nightgown, and the next he appears as a nun in a surprisingly intimate scene with another nun. The writing embraces that same playful absurdity. It can get raunchy at times, but the humor fits the film’s bizarre tone and helps keep the whole strange production entertaining.
Where the film begins to stumble is in the third act. Once Lover is finally resurrected, the story noticeably slows down. What had previously been a fast-moving, absurd comedy suddenly shifts into a much more drawn-out confrontation between the gravedigger and the widower.
Their extended “battle of words” drags on longer than it probably should, and the pacing starts to feel repetitive. It’s especially noticeable because the earlier acts move along with a strange but energetic rhythm. Here, the film almost feels like it rushed to reach this moment, only to slow everything down once it got there.
Unfortunately, that pacing shift causes the final stretch of the movie to lose some of the momentum that made the earlier portions so entertaining. Instead of building toward a chaotic finale, the film lingers too long in the same beats, and what should feel climactic begins to feel a bit tedious.
I give Dead Lover four out of five stars. It is exactly the kind of strange, scrappy film that reminds me why I enjoy low-budget cinema so much. It’s weird, theatrical, occasionally raunchy and clearly the product of filmmakers who had a very specific vision and committed to it completely.
Even with the occasional pacing issues in the third act, the creativity on display, from the multi-role performances to the intentionally simple stage-like production, shows just how much can be accomplished when a group of people fully commits to making something unique. The dedication and hard work from everyone involved in this project is obvious from start to finish. Watching it also took me back to my own brief adventure into low-budget filmmaking years ago. If I’m being honest, I wish the film I worked on back then had turned out even half as entertaining and confident as this one.
Sometimes passion and a little bit of weirdness really can go a long way.