Masculinity has more than its share of discontents. Many, if not all of them, are perfectly valid. But for Dan (Jason Segel, Shrinking), the co-lead in director Jorma Taccone’s Over Your Dead Body–a middling adaptation of the 2021 Norwegian film, I onde dager (The Trip)–it’s enough to turn him downright homicidal. His self-loathing over his perceived inadequacies, personal and professional, becomes directed at the nearest object: his younger, classically attractive wife, Lisa (Samara Weaving, Ready or Not).
Sam has failed to meet his own exacting definition of success as a Hollywood director of some note and general appreciation, while Lisa hasn’t found success as an actress either. Married for reasons both emotional and transactional, they look at each other, see nothing but failure, and allow bitterness, resentment, and ultimately, hatred to overcome whatever love and/or affection they once had.
They should be headed for divorce court. Instead, they’re headed for a weekend getaway at the family cabin owned by Dan’s retired father, Michael (Paul Guilfoyle). Both Dan and Sam want to make their last weekend one to remember. Each, however, imagines a similar end: Sam will die in a hiking accident; Dan will die in a shooting accident. Freed of each other’s malevolent presence, they’ll collect life insurance on their now dead spouse, pay off their debts, and restart the lives they imagine they deserve.
As blackly, sometimes bleakly, comic as that idea-rich scenario sounds, it’s almost immediately interrupted by the not-quite-unexpected arrival of a felonious trio, Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), escaped killers/convicts, and Allegra (Juliette Lewis), the correctional officer who broke them out of the local penitentiary, not out of the kindness of her heart, but because Pete apparently gives her what no other man (or woman) in the outside world can, frenetic, high-energy sexual intercourse capped by regular orgasms.
Working from Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney’s (Pizza Movie) underdeveloped, tonally off-kilter script, Taccone directs with a loose, broad, seemingly improvisational style. He first emphasizes the general chaos that the incompatibility between Dan and Lisa brings to each other’s lives, and later the cataclysm that the felonious trio represents. Tied up with nowhere to go and no place to hide, Dan and Lisa’s fractured relationship undergoes a trial, if not by literal fire, then by its metaphorical equivalent.
As with the original film, albeit enhanced with broader, more comedic moments and expertly handled gore, Over Your Dead Body mutates from a two-character thriller (“Who will kill who and how?”) into an existential thriller pitting two groups against each other. One inside the boundaries of polite society and, presumably, the rules of civilization, and the other entirely external to those boundaries and rules. Initially, neither Dan nor Lisa qualifies as root-worthy individually or collectively (far from it), but they become de facto root-worthy in comparison to Pete, Todd, and Allegra.
Whether the fault of the script or the direction (or possibly both), Over Your Dead Body suffers from a serious case of tonal whiplash, becoming increasingly mean-spirited, viciously violent, and altogether exploitative with every bloody confrontation. Short on redeemable features and defined by their innate cruelty and sadism, their eventual exits, one by one, in often gruesome, body-smashing manner, aren’t entirely unwelcome on a base, lizard-brain level.
Thematically, Over Your Dead Body doesn’t qualify so much as a (horror) comedy of marriage as it does as another over-familiar example of contemporary masculinity in crisis mode. Coded as superficially liberal, physically weak, or squeamish, Dan has to reconnect to his inner, Straw Dogs-inspired savage (sans feminizing eyeglasses), embrace a heretofore unknown propensity for brutalizing violence, and slaughter the monsters who’ve invaded his home (or rather, his father’s home). Once done, Dan can simply reassert his will on the world, re-win Lisa’s love and admiration, and just as importantly, restart his failed directing career.
Over Your Dead Body opens Friday, April 24, via the Independent Film Company (IFC).
