Dead Lover
She is a grave digger from a family of grave diggers, their motto to “dig deep, dig hard, never stop digging,” the only two certainties in life loneliness and death, a procession of mourners passing through her gates but never noticing her toil and dedication, their lives and grief private, an existence from which she is excluded, unseen yet smelt, carrying the stink of the earth and the corpses, “a skunk of a woman” who longs for more, to be seen and loved.
Using the plants which grow around her, the Gravedigger experiments to create a perfume, a scent which will disguise the smell of her only companions, the dead, but to her surprise, and that of the trio of local gossiping crones who watch and judge all that happens in the tiny hamlet, when she intervenes to save a poet from being savaged by a wild animal he sees her for who she is, their true love thwarted when he tragically drowns when returning to her arms from abroad, all that is left a severed finger.
Directed by Booger’s Grace Glowicki from a script co-written with Ben Petrie, she is the Gravedigger and he the Lover as well as part of the ensemble completed by Leah Doz and Lowen Morrow who play the entirety of the townsfolk who populate Dead Lover, living and dead, the Finger, the Opera Singer, the Widower, the Priest, the Swimmer, the gossips, the sailors, the nuns, rotating through a variety of costumes, beards and quirks.
Released “in glorious STINK-O-VISION,” Scratch and Sniff having been invented in the sixties and previously used by John Waters for the release of Polyester, it is undeniably a gimmick but one which suits the outrageous mongrel tone of the film, offering banana, strawberry milkshake, opium and less appealing experiences, both explicit and mysterious, as the Gravedigger drags her feet and shovel through the fresh soil and corpses, the lingering smell of the grave interrupted only by laughter.
Consciously theatrical in presentation and performance, the influences are many but the result is singular, the framing and lighting recalling German expressionism, Nosferatu and Caligari, also examinations of loneliness and heartbreak, the fantasies Viy and Heart of Stone, the exaggerated grotesquerie of Manual Cinema’s Frankenstein, the jerry-rigged adaptability of Lake Michigan Monster, the anarchy of The Comic Strip Presents, existing in a unique space in the same way as The Love Witch, though considerably less magnificently upholstered.
Sadness no stranger to a grave digger, it is usually vicarious rather than so personal or deeply felt, and having used the regenerative power of the lizard to bring her dead lover back her endeavours are a success in terms of demonstrating the theory though not so much the desired outcome, a horror comedy romance of desire, despair and decay, the circle of life disrupted but creating a new cycle of monstrosity, inevitably as mutated as its mud-spattered progenitor.
Dead Lover will be in UK cinemas (in STINK-O-VISION) from Friday 20th March
