Over Your Dead Body, 2026.
Directed by Jorma Taccone.
Starring Jason Segel, Samara Weaving, Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, Paul Guilfoyle, Keith Jardine, Kayla Radomski, Nikolai Kinski, Jake Curran, Jennifer Pettersson, Cha Yoon Lee, Robert Goodman, Danusia Samal, Andy Cohen, Iina Kuustonen, André Eriksen, Ilkka Villi, and Kumail Nanjiani.
SYNOPSIS:
A dysfunctional married couple retreats to a secluded cabin to repair their relationship, but each secretly plots to murder the other.
It’s fair to say that director Jorma Taccone (and his comedic music/filmmaking group The Lonely Island) have a distinct voice when it comes to comedic sensibilities, which makes it all the more surprising that not only is ultraviolent relationship action-comedy Over Your Dead Body based on the Norwegian film The Trip (from Tommy Wirkola, Nick Ball, and John Niven, here with Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, adapting the screenplay), but that much of the demented set pieces here sound lifted wholesale from that original version.
The keyword here is “distinct”, as without having seen that Norwegian original (which is only roughly 5 years old), there is a hunch that Jorma Taccone is working through the gonzo material his way while playing to the strengths of Jason Segel (somewhat against type in a role as violent and mean-spirited as it is one of amusingly poor planning and incompetence) and Samara Weaving (for once playing not just a hunted heroine, but someone who can quickly turn the tables with smarts and physicality, all while getting to utilize her natural Australian accent). Admittedly, this is a roundabout way of granting the benefit of the doubt that someone could watch both films and find the twisted sense of humor different (in an interview, Jorma explained this as a comedy-action focus rather than an action-comedy approach) even while following the same narrative trajectory.
Following a couple who begrudgingly go on a cabin retreat for some relaxation and to work through some marital issues, it is actually a ploy by the pop-up advertisement director husband, Dan, to kill his actress wife, Lisa, while staging it as a tragic accident. The filmmakers do have one new idea here in that the eventual escaped convicts and Stockholm syndrome afflicted corrections officer crashing the party (here played by Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis, and Keith Jardine) come with a romantic dynamic of their own that soon becomes a fractured mirror held up to the protagonists as they, at the very least, attempt to tolerate one another in an attempt to survive when their attempts to kill one another are blown up by this invasion. Naturally, their industry roles are also smartly utilized as everything from another layer of the relationship to a survival tool to another source of jokes.
Much of this is told with brief flashbacks intended to amplify the craziness while demonstrating how the characters ended up under one roof and how this situation escalated to this point. Sometimes, it undercuts the momentum the filmmakers are building (one sees the juxtaposition they are going for here by bringing another couple into the proceedings, while also confident that Jason Segel and Samara Weaving could have carried this as a Looney Tunes cat-and-mouse game concept by themselves, and wondering what that remake would have looked like), but the staging of each burst of comedic action (that will certainly cross into tastelessness for some) is more than well done, with some pitch perfect line delivery.
And while the results here are somewhat predictable regardless of familiarity with the Norwegian original, what makes this version of Over Your Dead Body work is its commitment to some utterly shocking and grotesquely astonishing gore and practical effects that go beyond severe stab wounds and shotgun blasts into faces blasted through the cranium. Bullets are doing things here that, yes, probably defy physics, but do so in a way one might have never known movies could do before. That’s without getting into the other graphic demises. More importantly, that willingness to push into extreme violence also covers up the fact that the plot here isn’t exactly that deep. The film also concludes with a cutting satire of the visual aesthetics of streaming films, making it worth a watch for that alone. More to the point, it is also crowd-pleasing with a fittingly mean-spirited sense of humor.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
