1 of 5 | Jason Segal and Samara Weaving star in “Over Your Dead Body,” in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Independent Film Company
Over Your Dead Body, in theaters Friday, is not always successful at the tonal balance it is trying to strike. It has enough surprises for a good night out at the movies and debates about what did not work after.
Dan (Jason Segal) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) spend a weekend at a cabin in upstate New York where each plans to murder the other. Both plans go awry and the married couple has to survive the weekend when a trio of escaped convicts and their corrections officer invade their home.
Though it takes the first third and several flashbacks to set up all the pieces, the tension begins early on as Dan clumsily sets his plan in motion. He awkwardly tries to set up an alibi with coworkers, and his anxiety makes it a struggle to get through basic housemaking scenes.
Lisa is so abrasive, one can see how it might be toxic to a marriage, but in a dark comedy and in Weaving’s Australian accent, it is endearing. Dan’s passive-aggression is just as toxic.
Both of their plans are messier than they anticipated. The time jumps to how they each set up their plans becomes a running joke.
The escape of Peter (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine) with corrections officer Allegra (Juliette Lewis) is also seeded in the early scenes.
Jorma Taccone directs Over Your Dead Body like a thriller, but with bumbling crooks and wannabe killers. When the mismatch becomes glaring, it’s hard not to feel the Coen Brothers could’ve nailed it.
However, it is admirable not to go for broad slapstick. It makes the tension of how Dan and Lisa will get out of this situation real.
There are some inspired darkly comic bits like Todd reacting to Dan and Lisa’s marital drama, though that also has precedent in movies like Ruthless People and The Ref. When violence ensues, Todd just won’t go down, also not the first time in cinema history but well played.
Dan takes a beating too and most of the characters suffer at least one comically graphic injury.
But, a long sequence about prison rape is unpleasant. Even when the joke is at men’s expense, rape is just no laughing matter. The late Norm MacDonald made it work in his comedy Dirty Work, but that was also his schtick on Saturday Night Live. It is an unfortunate detour here.
Making Dan a director of commercials with ambitions for films and Lisa a struggling actor makes them a showbiz couple. It’s the Jay Kelly problem. Those are hardly relatable struggles.
They could have been small business owners struggling in today’s economy with the omission of one film-related plot device later.
Dan and Lisa having to fight for their lives together should provide more moments where they connect but there’s only one. That should have been the thesis of the film, if it wasn’t going to be about them continuing to try to kill each other like low tech Mr. and Mrs. Smiths.
The idea that Dan finally mans up in the climax is reductive of Straw Dogs, whose theme is still debated on that front. Dead Body undercuts the Hollywood version of “manning up” but that’s still essentially the premise.
So Over Your Dead Body is very mixed but it is trying daring things. In between misses and woefully misguided threads, occasionally it lands on some clever macabre violence.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
