At TIFF, Canadian filmmakers Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie are the only lovers left alive | Canada Voices

There are lovers in a dangerous time, and then there are the trials and tribulations that Toronto’s Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie put themselves through on-screen.

In 2019’s genre-defying Tito, the couple star in a hilariously absurd look at the furtive relationship between two socially isolated neighbours. In last year’s nervy comedy The Heirloom, the two seemingly twist facets of their real-life relationship into a black comedy about doomed partners who rescue a dog during the pandemic.

But with their two new high-profile projects Dead Lover and Honey Bunch, both of which will play the Toronto International Film Festival next month after making respective splashes in Sundance and Berlin, Glowicki and Petrie take the concept of partnership to terrifying, and often terrifyingly funny, new heights.

“Oftentimes someone will say to us, ‘I can’t imagine working with my spouse.’ But it wasn’t as if we’d been together for a long time and decided to, like two years in, try working with one another. The very origin of our relationship was the question of, ‘Are we going to be together, or are we going to work together?’” says Petrie. “In the end, the only way it felt like it could happen was that it had to be both.”

“It was a tortured courtship for a while,” adds Glowicki, who met Petrie while working on a short film. “But then Ben just said, ‘I think we can do both,’ and then we had our first kiss.”

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It is unclear whether either realized that their first lip-lock would lead to far stranger, more perverse forms of cinematic passion.

Take the plot of the ultra-low-budget “camp phantasmagoria” Dead Lover, in which Glowicki plays an amorous 17th-century gravedigger whose foul stench attracts the attention of a local wannabe lothario, played by Petrie. Unfortunately for both parties involved, Petrie’s character perishes in a shipwreck, leaving only his severed finger to fill the gravedigger’s heart (among other places).

If that Mary Shelley-esque logline wasn’t enough of a manic fever dream, then there’s the highly stylized thriller Honey Bunch, in which the two play a couple whose relationship is tested by, in no particular order, fits of delusional paranoia, bouts of experimental surgery and the menacing presence of White Lotus star Jason Isaacs.

While Dead Lover is directed by Glowicki and co-written with Petrie (who also produces), Honey Bunch is helmed by another real-life Canadian couple – Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli – adding to the hall-of-mirrors effect of it all.

“And even when you look at the narratives of both, it’s doubly tricky and really strange,” says Glowicki, who filmed Dead Lover at the beginning of 2023 and Honey Bunch later that fall. “The movies, beyond narrative and tone, they’re reflections of each other. The dark and the light. They’re curious together.”

Enough that a back-to-back TIFF double bill might have been warranted – though the pair are also perfectly fine with Dead Lover receiving a Midnight Madness slot (where they plan to hand out scratch-and-sniff cards to the audience for moments requiring, say, the odour of burnt farts or opium) and Honey Bunch playing the more mainstream Centrepiece program.

“Midnight is the place for Dead Lover – it’s not a horror movie, it’s not a comedy, it’s a midnight movie,” says Petrie. “That’s the genre.”

“If I could make midnight movies forever, I’d be so happy,” adds Glowicki.

In terms of work ethic, the couple – who are expecting their first child just around TIFF time, which might make for an especially exciting premiere night – try to maintain a balance that is both philosophical and physical in nature.

“Our home is what they call two-and-a-half bedrooms, but the half-bedroom is where we actually sleep, just a small space barely big enough for a mattress, and the two real bedrooms are places for us as filmmakers,” Glowicki says. “Maintaining separation is the key to not becoming codependent and completely enmeshing, which I think is the death of art and collaboration.”

“We just learned to not be neurotic about it and keep doing it so long as we love doing it, and while we can also do other things,” adds Petrie, who is technically a triple threat at this year’s TIFF thanks to his brief but pivotal role in Matt Johnson’s comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. (Petrie previously collaborated with Johnson on 2023’s BlackBerry.)

The pair also try to separate things on set – which is not too difficult a distance to maintain, given that Dead Lover was shot in just 16 days.

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“Because we’re just in such a go-work mode, it sets the tone. But we also tend to hire friends or people who we connect with, so there’s a casual vibe,” Glowicki says.

“When we’re shooting something, 100 per cent of what we’re thinking about is the film,” adds Petrie. “Other than calling each other ‘sweetie’ on set, which I’d then apologize for to everyone, we’re usually more about neglecting our relationship and focusing on the work.”

And though the pair would likely bristle at being labelled Toronto film’s power couple, the two are aiming their collective sights slightly higher and larger for whatever project comes next.

“As filmmakers, we’re watching our peers make these bigger-budget movies, and we’ve only ever worked at the $500,000 Talent to Watch level, so we’ve learned so much, and hell yeah, we’d love something bigger,” Glowicki says.

After, of course, the two work on their most important co-production yet: the baby.

“I’ve heard there can be a lot of napping, so I thought I’d audio-note ideas for my next script,” Glowicki says with a laugh.

“There might be suckling in the background,” Petrie says. “But we’ll figure it out.”

Dead Lover screens at TIFF on Sept. 13 and 14; Honey Bunch screens Sept. 10 and 13 (tiff.net).