Student musical evolves into feature film ‘Death Do Us Part’

What happens when a healer, working in a plague-stricken medieval village, falls unexpectedly in love with Death himself? Moviegoers can soon find out when a black-comedy romance, which began as a Harvard College student production, lands on the big screen.

“Death Do Us Part” (2026), co-directed by Abigail Ory ’21 and David Chávez-Grant ’21, premieres August 9 at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Inspired by the medieval motif familiar from “Death and the Maiden,” the plot follows a healer named Giulia (played by Zara Devlin) who comes face to face with Death (Tony Award-winner Ari'el Stachel) when he arrives to collect the soul of her plague-ravaged mentor.

“The movie is, on one level, this medieval romance with humor and fantasy,” Chávez-Grant explained. “But underneath, it’s about ambition and integrity, and what happens when the thing that you're chasing begins to cost the people that you love.”

The idea for the story came to Ory, a folklore and mythology concentrator, after a conversation with fellow student Abraham Joyner-Meyers ’21 about modern American society’s discomfort with death.

“It feels like it’s something nobody really knows how to address and talk about,” Ory explained. “We were musing on, ‘What was a society where there was a very different expectation or perspective toward death?’ We thought of the Middle Ages.”

This led the students to examine the folk song “Death Goes A-Walking” and to learn more about the danse macabre artistic motif of Death as a character who dances with his victims. Franz Schubert famously built upon this tradition with his 1817 song “Death and the Maiden,” with words from a 1777 Matthias Claudius poem of the same name.

“That made me curious, what would cause those two characters to be in that place in the first place?” Ory said. “I ended up writing the stage musical based off of that question.”

Ory’s musical, which Joyner-Meyers directed, was staged at the Loeb Drama Center in 2019 by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club. Ory remembers it as a hectic, messy, and experimental process, but sees it as an essential part of the project’s evolution.

“Getting to realize your story that you’ve written in a way where you can really fully see it for both its successes and its problems is so, so helpful to the creative process,” said Ory, who went on to make the project her academic thesis.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, the life-long Bay Stater partnered with high-school friend Masha Strasburger to adapt the story for the screen. When they were finished, Ory sent the script to Chávez-Grant. The two had collaborated on commercials and music-video projects while living on campus, and she trusted his opinion.

“I really loved it because it never felt like a conventional period piece,” recalled Chávez-Grant, a native of Texas now based in New York City. “The historical setting gives you distance from the world, but the emotional conflicts were very contemporary. Everybody’s torn between ambition, relationships, what society expects, and following convictions.”

Film industry veteran Michael Fitzgerald ’73 became their executive producer. Joyner-Meyers joined as the film’s traditional music consultant and member of the arranging team for cast songs, while Harvard alumna Veronica Leahy ’23 became music supervisor. Dean Scarlett, a Berklee College of Music graduate who also worked on the 2019 stage production, returned as arranger-orchestrator.

The American filmmakers shot the feature in the central Italian region of Lazio, home to the capital city of Rome, from April to June 2024. In addition to stars Stachel and Devlin — who hail from the U.S. and Ireland, respectively — the cast also includes Italian actor Riccardo de Rinaldis, Serbian actor Darko Perić, and the multiple Emmy and Tony Award-winning Scottish actor Alan Cumming (“Cabaret,” “The Good Wife”).

The co-directors recalled being awed as Cumming — who played a big, bad villain named Lord Ingannamorte — arrived on set. Costumed in the character’s regally over-the-top red robes, Cumming delivered a flawless performance in only one take.

“He was a calming presence to us as new directors,” Ory recalled. “He was extremely patient with us, and showed us a lot of respect, and that meant a lot coming from him.”

Ory and Chávez-Grant said working as a co-directing team gave each more confidence while allowing them to share the load of logistics and decision-making.

Both alums credit their time at Harvard for equipping them with the tools needed to make movies. Chávez-Grant, who concentrated in philosophy, added that reading, writing, and philosophical discussions in the classroom prepared him to answer some of the big “why?” questions about the film, even down to the choice of why to include a certain camera angle or prop.

“If you’re not reading literature, if you’re not reading philosophy, if you’re not reading folk and myth as a filmmaker, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice,” Chávez-Grant said.

Ory agreed, citing her studies in helping her translate folklore to the screen.

“I can’t overemphasize how helpful the folklore and mythology concentration was for this,” she said.

The co-directors look forward to welcoming their international cast to New England this weekend, when audiences can finally see the feature-length film in its entirety. “Death Do Us Part” premieres August 9 at 7:30 p.m. at the Avon Cinema in Providence. Tickets can be purchased in advance via film-festival.org.

“It’s incredibly rewarding,” Ory said, “seeing your thing come to life, seeing life breathed into your characters, and seeing the beauty of the shots on screen.”