You know how there’s always that couple you know who are one simmering argument away from turning a restaurant into a crime scene, one passive-aggressive putdown away from ruining a dinner party, one thrown half-filled wine glass away from a complete screaming meltdown? That’s Dan and Lisa. He (Jason Segel) was once a promising filmmaker, whose debut feature made a splash on the festival circuit. Now this frustrated auteur directs those pop-up ads you constantly see on your phone. She (Samara Weaving) is an actor who dreamed of being the next Blanchett or Streep. Now she’s straining to nab parts in Off-Off-Broadway black-box productions. Neither of them are happy personally, professionally, matrimonially, you name it. Misery is supposed to love company, but these two? They truly, madly, deeply hate each other.
So it’s more than a little suspicious when Dan keeps casually, yet continually mentioning to everybody from his coworkers to his retired dad (The Good Fight‘s Paul Guilfoyle), how they’re heading upstate this weekend. Specifically, he keeps bringing up the fact that Lisa is planning a hike near one of the more dangerous areas near their place, and the weather is supposed to be bad, and look, he’s been warning her to be careful. It’s almost like he’s prepping an alibi in case, I dunno, anything bad happens to his “beloved.” The bag with the rope, duct tape, and hacksaw in his car certainly suggests an agenda that includes more than old-fashioned R&R.
Dan and Lisa fight on the drive up. They fight when they arrive at the lovely cabin in the woods near a lake. They fight over the way that Dan is cooking steaks, a.k.a. “her favourite meal,” for a dinner that conspicuously feels like a last supper. It’s not her favourite meal, by the way — that’s a whole other can of worms best left unopened — but the point is, they fight. And fight. And fight and fight and fight. Fight fight fight, fight fight fight! You’re so busy witnessing these two tear into each other that you might have missed an earlier TV news report about escaped convicts on the run. Or failed to noticed there’s one less knife in the wooden block in the kitchen.
Over Your Dead Body sets you up for something pitched around the midpoint of a rom-com and dark comedy, a tale of a missing wife and a “grieving” husband that’s equal parts Hitchcock, Nora Ephron, and a Today Show special news report. There are a few reversals of fortune on the way to Dan putting his divorce-via-murder plan into action, however, as well as a half dozen plot twists and wild tonal shifts heading your way at 120mph. Maybe Lisa isn’t quite as helpless or clueless as we think she is. Maybe Dan’s buddy Henry (Jake Curran) is even more incompetent than previously hinted at, in terms of aiding and abetting a homicide. Maybe some unexpected visitors, in the form of those fugitive felons — their names are Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine) — and a lovelorn prison guard Allegra (Juliette Lewis), are about to throw a ton of monkey wrenches into the mix. Maybe lawn mowers, pool balls, sharp-edged trophies, and other seemingly nondescript household items can cause grievous bodily harm if needed.
You wouldn’t necessarily think of this American remake of the 2021 Norwegian movie The Trip as a horror movie per se, but given the amount of Caro syrup that gets spilled in the second half, it’s definitely genre-adjacent. Call it The Gore of the Roses. Whoever enlisted Jorma Taccone to direct this deserves a raise, given that the charter member of the Lonely Island understands how to consistently ramp things up to levels of high ridiculousness. If you’ve seen Popstar or the trio’s famously silly SNL Digital Shorts, you know he’s got a keen sense of visual wit — timing matters in comedy; framing and movement equally matter in screen comedy — which comes in extremely handy when you’re trying to choreograph LOLs alongside OMGs. There’s a word for this type of storytelling, and Taccone deserves credit for delivering a superior version of this without outright aping its most famous practitioner.
The movie still overplays its hand, especially when the third act goes into full tilt-a-whirl mode, but it’s hard to dislike a movie that allows folks like Segel and Weaving — recently seen in similarly vicious, appealingly over-the-top Ready or Not 2 — to lean into being so equally dislikable. Ditto the Olyphant-Jardine-Lewis trio, who seem to be mounting their own college production of Escape at Dannemora within this black comedy about til-premeditated-death-do-we-part marital disintegration. Over Your Dead Body knows that sustaining a harmonious union amid petty jealousies, paranoia, and personal flaws is hard; navigating a hostage situation involving desperate sickos and sociopaths is even harder; and maintaining a balance of laughs and gag-reflex tweaking is the hardest of it all. See it with someone you loathe.
From Rolling Stone US
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