Over Your Dead Body (2026)
An unsuccessful commercial director (Jason Segel) and his struggling actress wife (Samara Weaving) leave for a weekend getaway in a forest cabin but both have plans to murder the other in the new dark comedy Over Your Dead Body, which recently screened locally at the Overlook Film Festival.
In director Jorma Taccone's remake of the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, the unhappy couple have let years of slights, infidelities, and financial mistakes curdle into plans for murder. They're in crushing debt so even a divorce wouldn't fully rid them of each other. Their plans go wrong and they're surprised to find two escaped murderers (Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine) and the guard who helped them escape (Juliette Lewis) hiding in their attic. Husband and wife must again unite to survive the danger.
Over Your Dead Body is at its best in its first half when Segel and Weaving are unleashing accumulated resentments on each other. Even though the film is not particularly long at 105 minutes, the second half feels protracted. It doesn't entirely lose its sense of humor, but the endless parade of action scenes featuring repulsive, over-the-top gore grows wearying.
Speaking of that gore, Over Your Dead Body is absolutely not for the faint of heart. It's a film for people who looked at Robocop and thought it chickened out on the gruesomeness. It used to be that the defense of extreme gore was that it was transgressive, edgy, and envelope-pushing. However, in an era where it feels like 75% of R-rated movies feature it, even prestige dramas like The Secret Agent, it's not daring. It's mundane. There is one bit of violence/gore involving a knife block in a kitchen that is imaginative and funny, but a lot of it here is purely gratuitous and adds nothing to the proceedings.
That said, Segel and Weaving both deserve praise for their
performances. They make the audience still care about them even though they're
would-be murderers. That's not an easy thing to do. Over Your Dead Body is
at its best when it just focuses on them.
