Tina Kakadelis
Dead Lover had its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The film is a true work of collaboration with a small cast of four playing multiple roles and shot entirely in the equivalent of a black box theater. After its SXSW screenings, Dead Lover was acquired by Cartuna and Dweck for distribution. Cartuna and Dweck are the team behind the physical release of last year’s cult-classic-in-the-making, Hundreds of Beavers. The mastermind guiding the collaboration behind Dead Lover is Grace Glowicki. She, along with her husband and co-star Ben Petrie, sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to talk inspiration, the freedom of fluidity, and elongated body parts.
Film Obsessive: Dead Lover, in its most basic description, you could say is a take on Frankenstein, but obviously far more than that. Where did the inspiration come from?
Grace Glowicki: It came from my desire to be super collaborative and to make a comedy. I really didn’t have an inspiration beyond that or an idea beyond that, but instead thought, oh, I want to make a writer’s room with my friends and I want to try to write in an unconventional process.
I assembled a group of myself, Ben [Petrie], my friend who’s a therapist, and two other filmmakers. Over the course of two years, we world built together. Like, I had this dream and this funny thing happened in it, or I remember this girl from high school. Then it was like, oh, gravedigger, a gravedigger is a cool profession.
We kind of just spitballed for a couple of years in this strangely arranged writer’s room. The inspiration for the story came from this group discussion.
How did you keep track of it? A Google Doc?
Grace: I was kind of a nut and thought stories were passed along orally originally. The origin of a story is an oral tradition. I thought, I’m not going to commit it to text for as long as I can to kind of honor this tradition of storymaking.
My thing was always, and continues to be, I’ll never forget a good idea. That was the ethos. We’ll remember. If it’s good, we’ll remember. If I can tell you the story and you can tell me the story, then we have a story. That was the philosophy.
Ben Petrie: I almost think that if there had been a Google Doc transcript running at the same time, it would have in some way changed the nature of the conversations that Grace was leading us through, because it was so completely unstructured.
It wasn’t even really talking about making a movie, at least at the beginning, and for a long while. It wasn’t really talking about a story and trying to break a story. It was really free, associative, and open. I don’t want to say it was like all ideas were welcome…I mean, certainly all ideas were welcome, but Grace was always, in a very, very subtle way, a rudder, guiding the conversations.
I think it was crucial to the way she brought the genesis of this project about. That the conversations remained very free and untethered to any real documentation.
Like a two-year-long game of telephone.
Grace: Literally. And it was on the telephone too. It was very strange. Sometimes I would ask myself, what am I doing? There was no real north star of what we were making. I think I started talking about it even as a TV show.
Sometimes I would be like, is this just a weird, lonely excuse to talk to my friends in this way that feels most connective to me, which is world building and trying to make each other laugh and imagine together.
At some point it’s like, what am I doing here? I think I was paying them 20 bucks an hour or something too. It was a very, very, very strange way to come to a movie script.
Since the film is so collaborative and internal, was there ever a worry that these jokes wouldn’t land when they left this little group?
Grace: It was kind of trusting that, if I can make Ben laugh, someone else will find it funny. If I could make Ben and Leah and Lo and laugh, then we’re cooking. It was sort of using each other as a very, very small feedback loop of if we could make each other giggle, we were like, okay, we’ll risk it.
You shot it in 16 days in a black box theater, and the film’s lighting is one of my favorite parts of the movie. A lot of people think more money is the answer in terms of making art, but I feel like more constrictions are the answer. Can you speak a little bit to that and the experience of taking over the black box theater?
Grace: You’re speaking my language. I’m all for restrictions. I don’t actually think my creativity works well without insane restrictions. The first film I directed, Tito, we shot in seven days. As Ben knows, I was trying to get us to shoot it in four.
I was just talking to Pete Ohs who, for five years, was making a movie a year. I’m just like, oh my God, that’s exactly the kind of shit that I so fetishize. Restrictions, for me, are super important. Doing the black box theater thing, I think some people do view it as a challenge, like, oh, how did you do it?
It was actually a great liberator. We need to do a shipwreck, swimming in the ocean, riding through a forest on horseback, doing a graveyard, and we got X amount of dollars, X amount of time, how do we pull that off? I really get activated in those environments. It’s totally key to how I work.
Ben: I just add a quick shoutout to the location.The inspiration for Grace, I know, was black box theaters, but for logistical purposes, we ended up shooting in a film studio. This really small, wonderful studio called Astrolab Studios in Toronto let us take the place over, paint the studio black, and it really became our little camp over the course of the three weeks we shot.
One other thing on the topic of constraints, at our premiere at Sundance, somebody asked Rhayne (Vermette) the DP, how did you work with all the constraints? It’s such a big action adventure plot, how did you manage to pull that off visually?
Rhayne answered simply, the camera is rolling, there are no constraints. Mic drop (laughs). That was the ethos of Rhayne and her camera team from the beginning of this.
Grace: And we also said continuity is for losers. That was another thing on the set that I think kept us far away from micromanaging and rolling with the restrictions we were in.
Monty Python is a clear reference, but to me, it felt like the early days of YouTube. I want to ask if that was another reference, but by the way you’re looking at me, I think I have my answer (laughs).
Grace: It’s funny you say that. Not so much YouTube for me, but me and Harry Chepka, who was one of the core members of the spitballing, I’m always trying to chase back to our days making comedy videos on Vimeo. Early days Vimeo and Funny or Die. Back when you could upload your own shit onto Funny or Die. We did that as well.
I do think that still to this day, my most fearless performances were in those stupid comedy videos I was just making with Harry, who was my roommate at the time, where we were just trying to make each other laugh. We had a couple costumes from Value Village and the back alley behind our apartment. We’re just putting them online and getting 55 views and being like, oh my God, can you believe it?
Just being so titillated by the fact that you could make something that was stupid and funny and put it up on a platform and have people engage with it. I think my comedic sensibility really comes from making those stupid sketch comedy videos to put online with my roommate in college.
You also kind of play with gender here and in your first film too, Tito. Can you talk a little bit about why gender is such an interesting topic to mess around with, especially and unfortunately now?
Grace: Totally. I really admired the freedom in SNL, Monty Python, Mel Brooks’ movies where there’s a certain comedy troupe space where gender bending and playing roles of different genders is commonplace. In part, I think, it’s born out of when you have a small number of actors and you’re in a troupe, you want to be able to perform and express different things.
I’m someone who believes gender is a performance. There’s such a freedom in that approach, and I think to restrict ourselves to only perform the gender we identify with or are perceived as or whatever, is just limiting. There’s so much fun and comedy in breaking that boundary and being fluid in that way.
Seeing Ben as an old woman delighted me. Ben’s my husband, so I have a great picture of Ben on the toilet in this old woman outfit. I just love everything about this. That’s my guy and it’s something just really punk.
I don’t really like labels and I also don’t like being told I can’t do things. I like fluid freedom. Iggy pop is an idol for me. This more punk approach to gender, you can’t put me in a box, and a you-can’t-tell-me-what-I-am vibe. This movie isn’t overtly political, but I think there’s an underbelly of freedom and fluidity that runs through it. That’s important to me as a performer and as a person.
And Ben, how was your experience playing an old woman?
Ben: I loved it. I mean, the Lover character I play is a man, but the first time I put on that old lady wig and makeup, I looked in the mirror and saw the face of my mom staring back at me. That was a liberating experience to explore that. It was awesome.
Last question for you guys is about the elongated finger in the film. Obviously a highlight. If you personally had to have an insanely elongated part of your body for the rest of your life, what would you pick?
Ben: Don’t tempt me (laughs)
Grace: Ewww (laughs) It’s all about girth.
But, okay, I don’t want to say nose because I feel like I already have a big nose and I don’t want more attention drawn there. Neck would be weird.
Finger is not a bad choice because at least it would be like a helper stick where you could do things. I think finger.
Ben: Yeah, because I think you want it to be an appendage and not your torso or an arm.
I was thinking an earlobe.
Grace: Oh, you could swing it around your neck like a scarf. I’m stealing yours and going earlobe. That’s a good one!
