2025 Sundance Film Festival Film Review: Dead Lover

Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover is an uproarious horror comedy. The film follows a grave digger (Glowicki) who is desperate to find a lover but can’t because of how she smells. Following a funeral, she meets the man of her dreams who loves how she looks and smells, only for him to perish in a tragic accident. In a state of desperation and sadness, she goes to extreme lengths to try and bring him back.

Dead Lover is a crafty gem that defines independent cinema and what the Sundance Film Festival is all about. The film was shot in a black box theater with minimal sets, giving the feel of an experimental play. There are unique editing and lighting techniques to symbolize things like a forest or how fast someone is running and the gore and make-up are so over-the-top it only adds to the comedy of it all. There are only four credited actors in the film and each actor plays several characters throughout the film. It has a lo-fi, no-budget, grab-a-camera-and-shoot vibe, similar to Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker or Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers. All of these movies look and feel different than your “typical” movie, yet all are made with a passion and creativity that excites one about the future of filmmaking.

What impressed me most about Dead Lover was the creativity and skill of Glowicki. Not only does she turn in several great performances, most notably her love-stricken grave digger whose voice sounds like a mix of Helena Bonham Carter, Jo Jo Siwa, and Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, and makes a visually interesting movie that goes against the grain of what we know of modern filmmaking, but she also wrote a delightful and silly riff on the classic Frankenstein tale. Her writing is electric, taking a story we already know and have seen a million times and twisting it into something new and original. It’s incredibly funny and features a good amount of raunchiness. And Glowicki never forgets that the central story of Dead Lover is a love story about a lonely woman trying to find her soulmate. It is as sweet as it is gory and deranged.

One of the great regrets I will have from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival is not being able to see Dead Lover at a late-night screening in a packed theater. While my screening was relatively full and there were plenty of people laughing, this is the kind of movie that could get a crowd roaring thanks to Glowicki’s cunning filmmaking, off-the-wall performances by the entire ensemble, and an inventive reimagining of a classic story.

Dead Lover premiered in the Midnight category of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

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