Sundance: Dead Lover, Touch Me | Festivals & Awards

No Sundance is complete without a trip through the Midnight programming. And very few films playing at Sundance are as creative and, ahem, as lively as Grace Glowicki’s exquisitely crafted Gothic comedy-horror “Dead Lover.” The writer/director’s second feature is a resourceful and theatrical take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 

In fact, the film even begins with Shelley’s words: “There is something at work in my soul that I do not understand.” In this case, the confused soul is a lonely, pallid gravedigger (Glowicki) struggling to find affection because she smells of corpses. The Gravedigger tries to change her fortunes by brewing a perfume to cover the scent, but that plan is mostly for naught. It’s not until a Count (Lowen Morrow) arrives to bury his operatic wife (Leah Doz) that she finds potential love in the form of the opera singer’s brother (Ben Petrie). The Gravedigger and the brother immediately fall for each other, to the point that the impotent brother decides to venture overseas to improve his sperm count so he can form a family with the Gravedigger. Their dreams of a happy future evaporate when, on his return voyage, the brother falls into the ocean, leaving only his severed finger behind. When the Gravedigger receives his digit, she combines an elixir made from lizards with lightning to grow him again. 

“Dead Lover,” to be clear, isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s a looney, delirious dark romantic film with a handmade quality. The small cast of players takes on multiple parts, often brandishing unserious fake beards and ghastly wigs. Neither the weathered crafts nor the exaggerated performances are a glitch, in fact, you can say that Glowicki’s interest in the performative nature of gender is in line with Shelley’s novel. Her evocative staging, relying on blinding lighting espousing primary colors wrapped in broad blankets of shadow, gives her film a throwback theatrical element not too dissimilar from their German Expressionist roots. 

I cackled throughout Glowicki’s film, an already ingenious work elevated by her enlivening performance. From a sailor with a patois accent, to lesbian nuns, lasciviously versed postcards, and a jagged score, “Dead Lover” is a camp classic in the making.

Writer/director Addison Heimann’s psychosexual Sci-Fi-horror film “Touch Me” gleefully struts the fine line between substance and style, and its first step is a strong one. In the film’s opening scene, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley), during therapy, talks about meeting Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), a track-suit-wearing, hip-hop-dancing tentacled alien with designs of saving the earth by populating it with CO2-sucking trees. Joey had sex with Brian that eventually became rough, causing her to flee toward the home of her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), where she still resides. Her entire story is shot as one long monologue, the camera steadily pushing into a close-up that Dudley lands with aplomb. 

Joey, with Craig, returns to Brian when Craig’s shower literally begins spewing out horse shit. Joey and Craig are immediately hooked by Brian’s sexual prowess, leading them to ignore Brian’s overtly murderous tendencies. The sex is just too good. In between scenes of ecstasy and Brian’s hip-hop workouts, Joey and Craig try to process their latent trauma, anxiety, and sexual appetites. Similarly, Brian and his assistant (Marlene Forte), who claim to have lost families, are working through their grief. 

The aesthetic language of Heimann’s film is a visual and auditory fantasia of Japanese influences, bold neon lighting, deep, vibrating beats and triptychs and diptychs. Heimann’s sense of the corporeal, the pleasure the body enacts, is so perceptive you nearly wish the entire movie was one continuous orgy. The film is also intermittently hilarious, especially whenever Joey and Craig are fighting for Brian’s affection using any means necessary. 

Where the film falters is actually delivering any emotionality. Though Heimann wants this picture to be an erotic therapy session, wherein Joey and Craig confront their past traumas through sharing and meditating—the potentiality of that sentiment is limited by the slacked plotting. The film also meanders so much, it even loses its irreverent edge.  The acting on the bigger emotions, falters, becoming wooden and stilted outside of the comedic skits. 

“Touch Me” often loses its way, but it also has a visual flair and a carnal power within an immersive world that doesn’t waver. It keeps you coming back for more.