For her sophomore function “Useless Lover,” which premiered within the Midnight part of the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant, co-writer/director and star Grace Glowicki embraced not solely her creepy facet, however her smelly facet too.
Talking to IndieWire’s Christian Blauvelt on the IndieWire Studio in Park Metropolis, introduced by Dropbox, Glowicki stated of her character, “She’s a lonely gravedigger who smells so unhealthy of corpses, nobody will come close to her. And she or he’s acquired a variety of feelings, so she’s very humorous and indignant and susceptible and tender and all these type of various things. So she’s sort of this anomaly of emotions and stink.”
To hone this specific strangeness, Glowicki labored along with her solid to seek out the characters finest suited to every particular person performer, all of whom exterior of the author/director/star play a number of components. This consists of Glowicki’s co-writer, Ben Petrie.
“It was a very distinctive casting course of,” Petrie stated of bringing the staff collectively. “Grace introduced Lea and Logan and I into the mission, and we rehearsed for some time earlier than ever deciding which characters we had been going to play. And Grace actually allowed all of us to sort of have an natural strategy to seeing which characters we gravitated in the direction of. And that made it actually enjoyable as a result of it, it allowed us all to make contact with the characters that we had been most enthusiastic about and let every side of our interior freak fly accordingly. And it was additionally cool as a result of it felt like, properly, should you screwed up one efficiency, you had 5 different characters you possibly can have a knock at.”
Elaborating on this course of, Glowicki and Petrie’s co-star Lowen Morrow added, “We workshopped these scenes and developed them in studio for months and months. And it was actually fantastic, all of us jumped out and in of every function in order that you possibly can watch after which soar in your self after which vice versa. So it was a very fantastic course of and like, I’m trans masculine and attending to play this unhappy, badass man, I can’t think about one other movie that anybody would solid me in like that. It simply was so enjoyable to get to love — I don’t need to spoil something, however let’s simply say metaphorically kick in some doorways.”
Glowicki’s lo-fi Frankenstein riff options an excessive amount of sensible filmmaking methods and budget-friendly manufacturing practices, all of which solid member Leah Doz felt added to their embrace of the movie’s total odd tone, which she hopes viewers will embrace as properly.
“There’s one thing actually particular about this mission and about — I feel what Grace creates that’s — that permits you to go to extremes,” Doz informed IndieWire. “And that’s what every of those characters do is like push extremes of ugliness, of vulgarity, of desperation. And for me as an actor, the enjoyable in having the ability to do that’s one thing I might love an viewers to be like, ‘Oh my God, you may go that far or farther? I don’t want to carry myself collectively a lot.’”
Watch IndieWire’s full video interview with the “Useless Lover” staff above.
“Useless Lover” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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