“Over Your Dead Body,” a darkly comedic, often murderously fun, yet still oddly disposable, rom-com thriller, is a film defined by tension. On a narrative level, it’s about the tension between a couple, played by a great duo of Jason Segel and Samara Weaving, who are going on a trip to a remote cabin by a lake, where, we soon learn, both are planning to murder the other.
Think “The War of the Roses” if it were injected with such a degree of hyperviolence that it became almost like gruesome slapstick, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s in store on the surface. However, the more you look closer at what lies underneath the film, helmed by SNL alum and “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” director Jorma Taccone, the harder it is to shake the messiness that’s less consistently madcap fun and more haphazardly freewheeling.
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The main reason is that this is not the first film to tell nearly the same story. Though “Over Your Dead Body” has two credited writers in Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, also formally of SNL, deserving just as much credit, if not more, are Tommy Wirkola, Nick Ball, and John Niven, who wrote the 2021 Norwegian language film “I Onde Dager” (which loosely translates to “The Trip”). “Over Your Dead Body” is not just nearly beat-for-beat the same movie, with recurring flashbacks tying everything together, but even lifts some key lines. There are some cultural differences, but by and large, it’s like one is a slightly distorted funhouse-mirror version of the other. The change primarily comes in the delivery and tone, as where “I Onde Dager” was certainly dryly humorous, “Over Your Dead Body” is more broadly comedic. This ends up undercutting the darker, more provocative elements this remake stumbles into, which feel more like they’re coming out of nowhere and nearly derail the whole thing.
And yet, despite this increasing tension that threatens to tear everything apart, “Over Your Dead Body” is impossible to dismiss entirely. Much of this comes down to how both Segel and Weaving fully commit to the chaos, hitting all the comedic notes perfectly to elicit consistent chuckles throughout. In many respects, when it’s just a two-hander between them, the film is at its strongest. You almost wish there was a version of this new take that was confident enough to make some new choices and prioritize the strong core.
There is one core turning point where the two versions diverge significantly: a character makes a wildly different choice and feels like a missed opportunity when they end up intersecting again anyway. It might have been fun to wrongfoot the audience in its own unique way, rather than just playing the same notes its predecessor already did.
Alas, that would require more creativity than this film, often surprisingly lacking, has. Despite all the fun there is to be had in the escalations that “Over Your Dead Body” builds to, it’s the type of fun that feels like you’re watching a car crash rather than something truly clever. It perpetually feels like Taccone wants to take a leap into outright farce, but he’s shackled to the bones of a film that’s a great deal more grounded than his sensibility.
When there is a moment that hints at the potential for sexual violence, the tonal dexterity this requires to be genuinely funny rather than merely shocking for the sake of it just isn’t there. Anything can be joked about, even the darkest of subjects, but you wish there were an actually funny joke here. It’s one moment of many that puts a damper on what was and could otherwise be a darkly playful pseudo-satire. Instead, this is one of those tensions that starts to feel more compromising than comedic or compelling.
If anything, it seems like “Over Your Dead Body” is caught between deconstructing itself and just going through the motions. There is one shot the film takes at the idea of streaming movies near the end, which is funnier than just about any other joke that came before it. It pushes it closer to what feels like a riff on the genre and the industry, though this bolder comedic bite is largely lacking elsewhere. Best of luck to the unhappy couple, who remain a messy riot and fun when they’re just left to their own devices, but the rest of the film around them still leaves much to be desired. [C+]
“Over Your Dead Body” premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival. It opens in theaters on April 24.
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