2 hours ago
2
“Dead Lover” director Grace Glowicki spent her film‘s premiere at TIFF with her sweater pulled up halfway over her face. During the fall festival, she was pregnant, and anyone who has been pregnant will tell you that extreme smells just do not agree with you. And that was a problem, considering TIFF marked the first time that the film was being shown in something she and her distributor had dubbed “Stink-O-Vision.”
For those who have seen “Dead Lover,” Glowicki’s film is all about smells, particularly foul ones. It follows a grave digger who can’t shake her stench and, as a result, can’t find love. She woefully introduces herself near the start of the film by explaining, “Basically that means, I don’t smell very good.” The film’s distributor, upstart Cartuna x Dweck, sniffed an opportunity to get audiences into theaters by letting them know just how bad the grave digger’s predicament really is.
“Dead Lover” will open in theaters on March 20, and select theaters will have individual screenings presented in “Stink-O-Vision,” complete with audience participation in the form of scratch and sniff cards you unveil over the course of the movie. The concept owes a debt of gratitude to John Waters and his release of “Polyester” in “Odorama” with similar scratch and sniff cards. Every time a number pops up on screen during the film, audience members will scratch a numbered heart symbol and take a whiff.
You’ll smell everything from “Opium” to “BBQ Stink” to, perhaps worst of all, “Ghost Puke” (just rancid). A few, like the strawberry-smelling “Milk Shake” marker are actually pleasantly palatable. But, for the most part, things are going to get funky.
When the grave digger finally does meet someone who loves her for her particular funk, he recites a fairly rancid verse of seduction: “I want to lick your stink, to taste your foulness. I want to shower in your smell and feast in your fetid rot. I want to pick up a piece of your poo and eat it like a banana.” Cue No. 3, and get a whiff of “Banana” on your card. (You’ll have to determine for yourself if it actually smells like fruit.)
Glowicki had noticed that for many indie films, especially a micro-budgeted one like hers, landing a theatrical release from a distributor was becoming more performative than anything. Your movie was in a theater, but there wasn’t anything that made it an event. But she had also seen exciting examples, like the “Hundreds of Beavers” team continuing to sell out shows of the film on a long tour, and when Cartuna x Dweck suggested that “Stink-O-Vision” might be a way to get audiences engaged in a new way, she was up for it, even if it meant enduring some intense smells while pregnant.
“I definitely was aware of the importance and the appetite of the audience for wanting to participate and have a communal experience, which is super cool, grassroots, and true to the indie filmmaking spirit,” Glowicki told IndieWire. “I had been clocking and observing how very important it can be for your film to get eyeballs, but also just for people to genuinely have fun with it. I think the struggle is thinking of something that’s not just a gimmick for gimmick’s sake, because the audience can smell that.”
Grace Glowicki in ‘Dead Lover’“Dead Lover” is the first theatrical release for Cartuna x Dweck, which is better known as a physical media and poster distributor. But the company went all out in making this first one an event, printing 15,000 individual Stink-O-Vision cards that were distributed around the country and in UK and Irish cinemas.
In almost every indie arthouse where “Dead Lover” will have a run, at least one screening will be in “Stink-O-Vision,” complete with the theater passing out the cards. Roughly 70 screenings have been booked so far. And demand at those particular screenings has been high, and Cartuna x Dweck is hoping they will only lead to more.
“I do not envy our fulfillment center that has just thousands of them sitting in one place, because I have one hundred in a Ziploc bag behind me, and I can still smell it,” said Cartuna CEO and founder James Belfer.
To craft the cards, Glowicki first identified all the moments in the film in which there’s a moment directly tied to a smell. She whittled 25 different instances down to just 10. She then developed the “Stink-O-Vision” cards with a company called Scented Storytelling, in which she would describe the smell she was hoping to achieve while they hatched the right combination of odors that could give that effect … some trial and error included.
Glowicki also wanted to make sure that there weren’t too many scratching moments that would ruin the rhythm of the movie or cause audiences to miss jokes when they turn their head down to scratch the card.
“It’s its own narrative, the order and the timing [of the smells],” Glowicki said. “It was really interesting to to think about, I directed this film, and now there’s this component on top of it that’s going to absolutely affect the viewing experience. It becomes this second film, almost, but in this medium of smell, so it feels like the ‘Stink-O-Vision’ version of this movie is actually its own thing.”
Clearly not everything Cartuna x Dweck releases will be done with “Stink-O-Vision,” but Belfer and Glowicki believe it’s incumbent on indie filmmakers especially to think of ways to make your movie an event and to give audiences some sense of a community experience.
“Audiences are just so used to now having an isolated experience watching stuff on their computers, tablets, or phones, or maybe their TVs,” Belfer said. “To do something that you can’t just experience alone in your house is enough. You don’t have to figure out some weird, crazy, costly thing, but, I think people are starting to want things that are a bit unique to a live experience.”
“Dead Lover” opens in theaters on Friday, March 20.
English (US) ·