“Over Your Dead Body” Needs Resuscitating
If you’ve been keeping up with Samara Weaving’s career this year, you’ll know she doesn’t have a great track record with husbands. In the Ready or Not films, she marries into a rich family, only to have to play a deadly game of hide and seek. Now, in Over Your Dead Body, she’s fighting for her life at the hands of her husband yet again. Based on the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, Over Your Dead Body had its world premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival.
Even though they won’t say it to each other, Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Weaving) don’t want to be married anymore. Dan began working as a commercial director after he wasn’t able to capitalize on his feature film from a decade ago, while Lisa struggles to make it as an actor. There’s a brewing sense of animosity between them, each blaming the other for the failures in their own careers, but both too stubborn to talk about it. Instead, Dan organizes a weekend getaway to his dad’s (Paul Guilfoyle) cottage upstate, where he plans to kill Lisa. Lisa catches on to his plan and decides to kill him first.
There are times when Over Your Dead Body wants to take a more nihilistic attitude toward its characters, choosing violence and brutality in a way that’s at odds with the darkly comedic domestic drama the film sets itself up to be. Namely, one sequence that comes around the midway point with the introduction of some new characters puts a damper on the film that is impossible to recover from. Without spoiling the circumstances that lead to these new characters crashing Lisa and Dan’s murder vacation, know that a prolonged sequence sees one of them attempting to rape Dan in a way that’s played for laughs. It serves no purpose and feels dismissive of the reality that men are also raped. It’s hard to sink back into a comedy after that.
CREDIT: Jorma Taccone
Looking beyond that scene’s impact on the rest of the film, there’s still the issue that Lisa and Dan are not believable as a couple. Even with the worst couples you know, those who fight constantly, there are glimmers of how they got together. Some sort of explanation as to why they started dating, let alone got married. The viewer doesn’t get that with Lisa and Dan. The problem seems to be a lack of chemistry between Segel and Weaving. Both are quite good in their roles, but need a different partner to sell this relationship as something the viewer should be rooting for. Obviously, things are off to a bad start with the whole murder-one-another plan, but this relationship becomes the thing Lisa and Dan begin to fight for. Unfortunately, the audience isn’t given a reason as to why.
Over Your Dead Body has the potential to be a breezy dark comedy, or at least as breezy as a dark comedy can be, but there’s a lot of weight bringing it down. The tone of the main relationship and the additional characters burden the film with too many plates to keep spinning at once. The narrative construction, which uses flashbacks to tell these separate stories and show how the characters find their way to be braided together, is fun, but becomes cumbersome toward the end. Over Your Dead Body has too much dead weight to make for a dark look at a romantic relationship.
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