Click here for the flashback interview with Jason Segel and James Ponsoldt for THE END OF THE TOUR.
OVER YOUR DEAD BODY is a bristling black comedy that perfectly balances the genuine terror of psychopaths on the loose with the tragedy of a marriage gone very, very bad. And makes them both hilarious. Not an easy trick, but director Jorma Taccone has pulled it off with aplomb aided by performances from Jason Segel and Samara Weaving as the spouses in question that are startlingly complex when lesser performers might have settled for slapstick and screaming.
Every relationship has problems, but few become as toxic as the marriage of Dan and Lisa (Segel and Weaving). It’s so bad that Dan, a director of sappy web pop-ups, has decided that the only solution is to kill Lisa, an actress devoted to the theater and being snarky to her teddy bear of a husband. You never quite get to the point of condoning what Dan is about to do in their remote cabin in the woods, but after listening to the couple as they drive to the country, he is, and by leaps and bounds, the more sympathetic of the two. Add to that the esteem-busting, rapid-fire criticism he receives from his father (Paul Guilfoyle), an Army vet with no filter and the unshakeable conviction that retirement home employee Kevin (Cha Yoon Lee) is trying to kill him. He may be elderly, but he’s still somehow scary.
Dan has a plan, which includes cooking Lisa her favorite meal before surprising her with chloroform and dismemberment. He may be homicidal, but he’s still a considerate guy. He’s also a guy who has issues with touching the raw meat he’s grilling with mail-order peppercorns. If only that were not Dan’s biggest obstacle. That would be the fugitives who have decided the cabin is the perfect place to lay low after breaking out of the big house. Not just any fugitives. They are Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), two convicts serving time for murder, and the prison guard, Allegra (Juliette Lewis), who broke them out when she fell for Pete. They’re the psychopaths, by the way. All three of them. Each with a creepiness that is as unique as it is deeply unsettling.
What ensues is a night where blood and blunt-force trauma abound, psychological torture runs free, and a couple find a way to save their relationship by becoming the people they were meant to be. If they can stay alive.
The deadpan narrative takes a curly cue structure that interrupts the narrative with piquant flashbacks at salient moments to catch us up on the other characters and how they arrived at the cabin. The action is swift, furious, and rife with wicked twists that will wrench you out of your seat. This is not cartoon violence, either. The killings are neither quick nor easy, nor is the way flesh rends or contusions erupt from heads. Olyphant, square-jawed and perversely affable, is the embodiment of the shadow side of every normal guy just trying to get by while Jardine, a man-mountain with cauliflower ears, gives Todd the odd innocence of 5-year-old with a fixation on Harry Potter. The best of the three, or worst, is Lewis, who can arrange her face into a Kabuki demon mask when frustrated by being crossed, and can also being a hopeless, and clueless, romantic swept away by passion and a low threshold for boredom.
OVER YOUR DEAD BODY is a cautionary tale about love gone wrong and love tossed away. There are even some shots at the film industry thrown in for good measure that amplify motives and make victory all the sweeter. The sheer impudence in concept and execution is bracing, amusing, and somehow edifying despite being anything but a moral lesson. No, this is just a pure and perfect guilty pleasure. With wincing.
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