Toronto’s Grace Glowicki is many things — actor, director, writer, producer, dog lover, new mother. But the word that best describes her as an artist is fearless.
Glowicki’s performances are often heightened, absurd, and sometimes very gross. Her films show little regard for delicacy or gender roles, and are filled with intense and messy feelings.
Take her latest film, Dead Lover, in which she plays a stinky gravedigger who resurrects her dead lover using only his severed finger. The outrageous, Frankenstein-inspired horror-comedy has a DIY-theatre aesthetic: a small cast rotates between a bevy of motley characters — there are nuns who have sex in secret and a lonely blind fisherman who gets hugged to death.
Shot on 16mm film and scored by Toronto’s Meg Remy (U.S. Girls), Dead Lover is luminous and serrated, evocative of low budget creature features. True to its odorous themes, the film’s Canadian premiere last fall was presented in “Stink-O-Vision.” Each viewer was provided with a scratch-and-sniff card, and prompted throughout the film when to scratch to get a better (stinkier) sense of the story’s setting. Audiences responded to Stink-O-Vision so well that the film will continue to hold the immersive screenings when it returns to theatres across North America this March and April.
The film is unhinged and hilarious, one for the freaks and yearners who refuse to be coy about their loneliness and love of love. It received glowing reviews following its premiere at Sundance last year — American critic Robert Daniels described it as “a camp classic in the making” and praised Glowicki’s “enlivening performance” — and was rapturously received by audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival last September.
Like all our greatest artists, Glowicki is doing whatever she wants and, blessedly, getting away with it.
Ironically, she wouldn’t describe herself as fearless. “Socially, I’m not that risky. I’m kind of anxious and nervous,” she tells The Grind over Zoom one evening in February as the sun slowly sets and twilight blooms. Absorbed in our conversation, she’s neglected to turn on any lights. “For someone like me to perform in front of a crowd just feels so rebellious.”
Over the course of her young career, Glowicki’s absurd but brilliant approach to film has attracted a loyal following, especially in the world of underground cinema. Now, the world is taking notice.
Born in Edmonton, Glowicki moved to Montreal as a young adult. While studying at McGill University, she found herself feeling creatively unfulfilled, as though “something was missing in my identity.” She started auditioning for plays and eventually landed a role as “a dominatrix lesbian robot” in a one-act production called Friends For Rent. She hasn’t looked back since.
“I fell in love with the feeling of being a part of this little community of weirdo performers,” she tells The Grind. “And then I got addicted to the feeling of performing in front of a live audience and how scary and vulnerable that is.”
After graduating, she moved to Toronto, where she landed a few roles in TV series and short films. It’s also where she met her creative partner and future husband, actor and filmmaker Ben Petrie. In 2016, Glowicki starred alongside Petrie in the short film Her Friend Adam, for which she won a jury award at Sundance.
She made her directorial debut in 2019 with Tito, a film about a young man (played by Glowicki) trying to escape from sexual predators, who eventually finds companionship in a neighbour named John (Petrie). Glowicki’s Tito is so terrified of the world that he’s literally all scrunched up, as if to hide within his torso. The New Yorker called her performance “an instant classic of acting.”
Her next big role came in Booger, a dizzyingly beautiful meditation on grief by director Mary Dauterman. The film is gross, not just because of the bile-caked hairballs Glowicki’s character Anna coughs up, or the slimy catfood she voraciously downs, or the thick black hair that begins growing out of a cat bite, but also for its confrontation of our fear of grief.
These vivid physical acts, Glowicki says, come easy. “The hard part of that movie was when I’m just having a normal fight with my boyfriend.”
Not all of Glowicki’s characters are so outrageous. In last year’s horror-thiller Honey Bunch, directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, she portrays Diana, a strong and confident woman who is being gaslit by her husband Homer (Petrie).
Glowicki carries Diana’s fear and resilience in how she observes her macabre surroundings. It’s in her wide eyes and flinching muscles that we read the character’s growing trust in herself and apprehension and distrust of her husband.
The film is also buoyed by the undeniable chemistry that exists between Glowicki and Petrie, who welcomed their first child together late last year.
“We have a high regard and respect for each other’s point of view,” she says. “We’re able to spar and collaborate and have this friction that creates these projects with such an intimate shorthand and care with each other.”
What connects Gravedigger with Tito, Diana and Anna isn’t just Glowicki’s indelible portrayal of these characters — it’s also their apparent need for love and connection, which feels more resonant now than ever before.
“It feels like the biggest puzzle in my life and in the lives of my friends,” she says. “How do we relate? How do we connect? How do we heal each other?”
For Glowicki, answers to these questions can be found in art. Creation allows for freedom, and doesn’t leave much time to be scared.
Dead Lover plays at Revue Cinema April 3-9 and at The Fox April 11 & 12. Honey Bunch is on CRAVE.
This article appeared in the 2026 Apr/May issue.