Review: Over Your Dead Body — Crooked Marquee

Over Your Dead Body isn’t the first attempt to offer a darkly comic tale of a marriage gone murderously wrong; at minimum, it’s an adaptation of Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian 2021 original I onde dager aka The Trip. It also feels like a 21st-century rehashing of The Ref mixed with The War of the Roses (or a 2026 rehashing of 2025’s The Roses). While director Jorma Taccone’s long-waiting follow-up toPopstar: Never Stop Never Stopping isn’t terribly original, it is terribly funny and gleefully violent. With every cruelly hilarious joke and delightfully gnarly injury, Over Your Dead Body goes for the jugular—which is ironic given that this is perhaps the only wound we don’t see inflicted in its 105 minutes of blithely black-hearted brutality.

Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) loathe each other, which is unfortunate because they happen to be married. They also aren’t too happy with their lives: he’s a one-time film director who’s now doing commercials, and she’s an actress who never really made it. Their huge house disguises their flailing careers and resultant financial troubles. So while other couples might see a getaway to his family’s remote cabin as a chance to rekindle their romance, Dan and Lisa each see it as the perfect time to end their marriage via a little murder. Unfortunately, their (very stupid) plans are each stymied by the unexpected arrival of some strangers at the cabin.

Dan and Lisa do have a bad marriage—she’s critical, he’s controlling, and they’re both just the worst—but it’s never so bad that it seems to merit murder, though maybe that’s the idea. However, it’s not entirely clear if there is a larger point here in the script from SNL alums Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney. This lack of thematic depth would be a bigger problem if Over Your Dead Body weren’t so goddamn funny. The dialogue, delivery, and every over-the-top moment of gore make for a high laughs-per-minute ratio. It’s a great movie to see with a crowd; there are so many loud reactions that surround you, from the guffaws at the very good jokes to the sounds of disgust at the very icky injuries. It’s also a good way to figure out if your date is as big of a piece of shit as you are, if they laugh as loud as you do when the darkest jokes and grossest violence might make better humans furrow their brows. (If so, your relationship might have more promise than Dan and Lisa’s.)

It’s all shriekingly funny—until it’s not. In the second act, it’s ambiguous whether an attempted sexual assault is supposed to be funny. If it’s not, then it’s unclear why there’s a whole scene devoted to an act of rape in a film that’s otherwise this consistently comedic. If it is included for laughs, then Taccone and writers Kocher and McElhaney seriously misjudged the moment, both in the movie and in the larger cultural sphere. I suppose they think there’s a bit more latitude since it’s a man being violated, which upends audience expectations, but uhh, still not funny, my dudes.

In spite of that scene (which is somehow relatively brief and still far, far too long), there’s a lot to love in Over Your Dead Body. Segel and Weaving are well-matched as leads (even if their characters aren’t), trading bitter barbs and reacting hilariously to an absolutely insane situation. Yet the real MVP might be Keith Jardine as one of the strangers, whose shaved head, homicidal tendencies, and hulking physical presence are juxtaposed with a sweetly stupid delivery and impeccable comic timing. After Ready or Not and its sequel, Weaving definitely has the damsel-in-distress shit down, but she’s still bringing something different to Over Your Dead Body than she did to those horror movies with a character who is far less likable, but we still don’t want to see die. Segel is new to this level of violence on screen, but he’s a comedy vet who’s clearly up for anything, including playing a giant asshole, and still getting laughs.

Taccone is predictably great at handling the comedic beats, but I was impressed by the action and horror elements. There’s some truly nasty stuff here (complimentary), and it’s both believably gross and funny. Over Your Dead Body’s script is also a bit more structurally complex than its marketing implies, and it entertains by inserting little details throughout its running time—and paying off each of them in a fun way.

“In a relationship, the key is finding ways to keep things fresh,” says Timothy Olyphant in a supporting role. It’s excellent advice for romance, but also for filmmaking. While Over Your Dead Body isn’t doing anything particularly inventive in telling a story about a couple whose bickering turns to butchery, it does so with enough energy and more than enough jokes to make it worth the commitment.