Dead Lover (Review): The Mighty Boosh meets Grand Guignol in a camp, grotesque take on the Frankenstein story
Lucie gets down and dirty with the years most smellable cinematic experience.
Dead Lover launches in select UK & Irish screens from Friday March 20. To find your nearest cinema, click here: https://linktr.ee/DeadLoverUKI
All screenings will be presented in Stink-O-Vision (scratch ‘n sniff cards).
It’s often said that certain films stick with you - lingering camera shots, themes or imagery follow you home long after leaving the cinema. But it’s not often that you can say you took the smell of the film home with you. However, for Grace Glowicki’s new horror-comedy Dead Lover, that is exactly what happens! Presented in Stink-O-Vision, it tells the tale of a putridly pungent gravedigger (played by Glowicki) who longs for love, and stops at nothing to have it.
So, what is Stink-O-Vision? Put simply, it manifests through a scratch-and-sniff card handed out to audiences - a la John Waters’s “Odorama” for his 1981 film Polyster - featuring numbers from 1-10. Throughout the film, numbers appear onscreen during certain scenes, telling you which to scratch to get the scent of the scene. This mode of presentation was not just for the screening I was at, but will be the case for every showing of the film. The numbers on the card for each scent were also intriguingly named (some highlights being “Ghost Puke”, “Funky” and one which was simply named “????”), which built a lot of anticipation before the film began - how would the scents feature? What did they mean? And crucially - what would they smell like?
As a seasoned horror-lover, I must say it takes a lot to horrify me. There is little I can see onscreen that truly disturbs me at this point - but, I have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell (it was once remarked by a former flatmate when living in Slovakia that I’d be able to tell if someone opened a bin in Prague) and I fear I will never be able to un-smell some of the scents in this film. For that reason, I found Dead Lover a viscerally horrifying experience- but, a fun one, too. It feels like no coincidence that John Waters was a previous proponent of smelly screenings, as Dead Lover definitely exists in a similarly grotesque and surreal world to Waters’s own work. Shot in a black box on 16mm film, with a cast of just four actors who multi-role, often in drag, wearing shake-and-go wigs and over the top stage makeup, this felt like a madcap piece of absurdist theatre as much as a film. Each actor (Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow) throws themselves wholeheartedly into their roles, and you get the sense that they are all thoroughly enjoying themselves. While there have been many takes on the Frankenstein story in recent years, none have been so depraved, raunchy and utterly unhinged - no, not even Poor Things.
While effectively immersive, I don’t think the Stink-O-Vision was essential to the film, as the performances, aesthetic and sound design were incredibly evocative in themselves. In fact, though it was a novel experience, each time a number floats up onscreen to prompt the Stink-O-Vision, it somewhat pulls you out of the action as you scrabble for your scratch-and-sniff card in the dark, squinting at the numbers to ensure you scratch the correct one. This doesn’t really matter - you’re unlikely to miss any major plot points by taking your eyes off the screen during one of the Stink-O-Vision moments, but it did start to get a bit grating. This may also have been because the film began to drag a little in its third act - such an intense experience that assaults on the senses in every way can get a bit exhausting, and so I personally felt it could have done with being a little shorter.
Overall though, this is a very bold and experimental project, which has a lot of fun re-treading familiar ground in a zany, original way. Success never smelled so bad.
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