TORONTO – Grace Glowicki is bracing for more than one premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.
There’s the Canadian debut of “Dead Lover,” her cadaverous horror-comedy co-starring her husband, Ben Petrie – and, potentially, the birth of their first child.
“Wouldn’t that be so funny if my water broke on stage during one of the Q-and-A’s?” quips a pregnant Glowicki, who’s due to deliver Sept. 29.
“We were thinking of doing a bit about it – pretending that my water broke (using) a water bag. But then I realized that it would be a little too much existentially. The confusion of experiencing life and art. So I was like, ‘No, I think I need a boundary.’”
Glowicki says she and Petrie sometimes struggle to figure out where love ends and work begins.
At TIFF, they co-star in two relationship-driven projects. Alongside “Dead Lover” — which garnered buzz at its Sundance and Rotterdam premieres and closes the Midnight Madness program on Saturday — they also share the screen in the Gothic horror “Honey Bunch,” screening Saturday afternoon.
“We got married in between (filming) the two movies, and marriage is a big theme in both of the films. So it’s been super strange,” Glowicki says during an interview in Toronto.
“My experience of life has really blended with my experience of art. It’s sort of this infinity loop, where there’s not a super clear division. Same with Ben – we can go from talking about our personal life to talking about work very quickly.”
In the Victorian-era “Dead Lover,” Glowicki plays a foul-smelling gravedigger whose love life seems doomed until she meets Petrie’s aristocratic cad, a man strangely enamoured with her stench. They pledge to build a life together, but tragedy strikes when he’s shipwrecked, leaving only a severed finger. She sets out to resurrect him from his remains.
Glowicki says the film, which she directed and co-wrote with Petrie, is a meditation on “anxious attachment styles.”
“I think it came from my own relationships, learning that sometimes when you feel someone pulling away from you, your impulse is to try to grasp onto them or hold them tighter,” she explains.
“If you love it, let it go. The exploration of that adage is just me bashing up against that in my own life… To really love someone, I do believe you really have to love their freedom, even from you.”
Glowicki says she and Petrie live that lesson by encouraging each other to take on projects outside their partnership. Petrie is involved in two other TIFF films: he has a role in Matt Johnson’s “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” and edited Patrick Bresnan’s short “The Contestant.”
Still, she notes their bond has always been anchored in artistic collaboration. They met while working on a film.
“We started out being attracted to each other as collaborators and as people, and then when we started our relationship, we said, ‘Maybe we can do both.’ So both versions of my relationship with Ben really started at the same time.… It’s hard for me to parse those pieces of us apart,” she says.
Petrie says walking that tightrope took some trial and error. In his 2016 short film “Her Friend Adam,” he stars as a man who gets into a fight with his girlfriend, played by Glowicki, after suspecting her of having an affair.
“We did one kind of unstructured improv where we let our real life bleed into it. And our feelings got hurt and we got into a fight,” he shares.
“And honestly, since then, I think we pretty much understood the boundary between ‘this is work and this is fiction’ and there’s enough respect and understanding between each other for what it is that we’re trying to do.”
The couple has been collaborating ever since.
In Glowicki’s 2019 directorial debut “Tito,” they co-star as two reclusive neighbours who slip into a toxic friendship. In last year’s comedy “The Heirloom,” helmed by Petrie, they play an anxious couple whose bond is strained after adopting a dog during the pandemic, drawing from their real-life relationship.
In the ‘70s-set “Honey Bunch” — co-directed by another Canadian couple, Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli — Glowicki and Petrie star as Diana and Homer, married schoolteachers who retreat to a remote rehab clinic after Diana wakes from a coma — but the doctor’s experimental therapy sparks disturbing visions.
Glowicki expects more spousal collaborations on the horizon.
“We’re both writing projects as directors, and chances are we’ll find roles for each other in those films. I think we’ll continue to work together on and off throughout the years.”
But first comes their most personal project – a baby.
While Glowicki can’t guarantee a live birth at the “Dead Lover” premiere, she does promise a smell-o-vision experience.
To underscore the intensity of her character’s stench, she says the audience will receive scented cards to sniff at specific points in the film.
“We’re hoping that we get some pukers.”
— With files from Cassandra Szklarski
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2025.
