Grace Glowicki’s DIY necro-romance turns grotesque theatre into a sensory stunt; the comedy is a little hit-or-miss, but thanks to Stink-o-vision this is a welcome reminder that cinema can still be an event.
★★★
There’s a particular kind of film that only really makes sense in a room full of other people, the kind where the reaction matters as much as the text itself. Dead Lover belongs squarely in that tradition. It arrives dressed as a lo-fi, black-box riff on Frankenstein, all painted backdrops, exaggerated line deliveries, and deliberately artificial staging, but its real subject is closer to the act of spectatorship itself. How far can you push an audience, and how much fun can you wring from the attempt?
Grace Glowicki plays a lovelorn gravedigger who loses the man she desires and sets about resurrecting him through increasingly grotesque means. The narrative is skeletal, by design. What matters is the accumulation of textures: damp earth, rotting flesh, theatrical fog, and, crucially, the much-publicised scratch-and-sniff “Stink-O-Vision” cards handed out at screenings. At ten key moments, the film invites you to smell what you’re seeing, collapsing the distance between viewer and image in a way that feels both gleefully juvenile and oddly sincere.
That gimmick has obvious antecedents. John Waters pushed the idea with Polyester, where “Odorama” scratch cards turned bad taste into participatory spectacle, and before that William Castle built entire marketing campaigns around gimmicky electrified seats and flying skeletons. Glowicki’s film slots neatly into that tradition, less as homage than as continuation. If Avatar can revitalise theatre-going through the immersive promise of 3D, then stink-o-vision feels like its scrappier, punk cousin, no less valid for being ridiculous.
And it works, at least initially. There’s a genuine thrill in feeling a room react together, a ripple of laughter or disgust moving through the seats as people tentatively scratch their cards. The film’s design leans into that collective experience: performances are pitched high, jokes are telegraphed, and the visual style favours bold, legible compositions over subtlety. Glowicki commits fully, her physicality doing much of the heavy lifting, and there’s a tactile inventiveness to the effects that keeps the eye engaged even when the material threatens to stall.
Because stall it does. The central comedic thrust, a collision of necrophilia, romantic longing, and absurdist grotesquerie, only land intermittently. There are stretches where the humour feels strained, even awkward, as if the film is waiting for the audience to meet it halfway and not always getting there. Repetition creeps in, and the thinness of the material becomes harder to ignore as the running time ticks on. What plays as anarchic in the first half can feel like overextension in the second.
Still, it’s difficult to begrudge a film this committed to its own bit. The rough edges are part of the texture, inseparable from the same DIY ethos that makes it feel alive. For every joke that misfires, there’s an image or a sensory gag that lands, and more importantly, there’s the sense of an audience being asked to engage, not just consume. In this age, that’s a delight.
The most persuasive argument Dead Lover makes is not about its story or even its humour, but about the value of going to the cinema at all. In an era where the default mode of viewing is solitary and frictionless, here is a film that insists on friction, on presence, on the minor awkwardness of sharing a strange experience with strangers. If spectacle is what gets people through the door, then spectacle can take many forms. Not every film needs the scale of 3D immersion to justify itself. Sometimes a scratch card that smells faintly of bananas and vomit will do the job just as well.
That in itself is worth celebrating.
Dead Lover is in UK cinemas from Friday
Whitlock&Pope 