Dir: Grace Glowicki. With: Grace Glowicki, Ben Petrie, Leah Doz, Lowen Morrow. 95 mins. Cert: 18
If semi-traumatised memory serves, the last UK theatrical release to arrive with an integral scratch-and-sniff component was 2011’s ill-fated Spy Kids 4, which invited its victims to huff the gastric emissions of a yapping robot dog voiced by Ricky Gervais. This microbudget Canadian horror curio offers far more art than fart, although its smell-o-vision conceit is but one unusual element in what is an altogether bizarre proposition: a morbidly perverse chamber play with a pastiche penny-dreadful plot, pieced together by writer-director-star Grace Glowicki. Some whiff of that narrative persists among the perfumes awaiting your nostrils: scents include ‘love’, ‘opium’ and ‘ghost puke’, plus ‘milkshake’ by way of half-time light relief. Delicate sensibilities are advised to stay at home polishing their first editions.
Its heroine is odorous by trade. A lovelorn gravedigger of indeterminate age and origin – Glowicki’s accent, roaming between Canada, Canvey Island and Canberra, becomes part of the fun – she’s driven to extremes after her verse-spouting poet sweetheart (co-writer Ben Petrie) perishes in a shipwreck. Part-Burke and Hare, part-Victor Frankenstein, she’s soon salvaging what she can of the corpse: an extended finger pointing to comic and carnal possibilities alike. The script – part-Carry On, part-Ken Russell – grabs both: “I do hope he loves how big my bush has got while he’s been away,” sighs our gal, during some wistful botany. Even without the scratch-and-sniff, even before two lesbian nuns wander on, much of it would qualify as ripe indeed.
Unmistakably the work of the industry that nurtured Guy Maddin and the AIDS-era singing rectum musical Zero Patience, the whole is as much frequency-film as midnight movie. Lock onto its wavelength, and rude chuckles await; struggle, and the filthier fragrances flooding the stalls would likely prompt an awful headache. Follow your own nose: this one’s going for gross and grotesque, and it beds right down when it gets there. Still, Glowicki frames her go-for-broke performance within striking images, and she finds suggestive ways to cover budgetary holes, not least nicely squishy practical effects. Too much the acquired taste (and smell) to recommend unreservedly, but also distinctive, never dull and – much like its most noxious niffs – difficult to shake.
Dead Lover opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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