Over Your Dead Body

With The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) in the director’s chair, Over Your Dead Body is a gruesome, darkly comedic depiction of spouses who decide to skip couples therapy to deal with their marital issues and go straight to homicide instead. Jason Segel plays Dan, an antsy, uninspired director helming adverts and short-form content rather than, as he once did, feature films. With his marriage to aspiring actor wife Lisa (Samara Weaving, truly one of our greatest on-screen screamers) on the rocks, he whisks her away to his father’s cabin in the woods, where they eat steak, play the world’s most annoying game of Scrabble, and bicker constantly.

But when he approaches her from behind, chloroform in hand, ready to knock her out before knocking her off (in order to claim her life-insurance money and finally be free of her belittlement), he gets a surprise— she was planning the exact same thing. They come clean about their bloody intentions, battling it out over whose crocodile tears would be most convincing to police, when some surprise visitors to the cabin leave them fighting for their lives in entirely different ways.

A remake of Thrash writer-director Tommy Wirkola’s 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, this is a very starry affair — Segel is a modern comedy icon, Weaving is one of the best Final Girls in the business, and they’re later joined by Timothy Olyphant and Juliette Lewis, both on twisted, villainous form. As such, Over Your Dead Body is always watchable, especially in the scathing back-and-forths between Dan and Lisa. The core dynamic between them is the most interesting element here, even if their problems (cheating, debt, lack of respect for each other’s creative endeavours) feel generic and under-explored.

Once the rest of the ensemble join the party, though, the film switches gears, and moves into far more hyperbolic and graphic territory. The violence is intense and stylised but often feels unnecessary, and its shock value is totally negated by the understated reactions of the characters. There’s also a nasty edge to its approach to sexual violence, which, instead of feeling jokey or subversive, simply leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It all adds up to a second half that feels like a totally different movie from the one the set-up promised, full of incidents the script doesn’t give us nearly enough to care about, all of which unspool to a disappointing finale.