Released: 10th June
Seen: 12th July
The dark comedy is one of the harder genres to nail because there’s a very fine line between “A dark joke” and “being a tasteless fuck” and it’s a line that’s incredibly easy to cross. Not only that but if you don’t actually push far enough with a joke it can just feel kind of dull, like in the movie How To Make A Killing which showed that you can have a dark comedic premise but fail at the actual comedy element. The idea of a couple trying to murder each other is a premise that can absolutely lead to some great dark comedy if done well, but can also lead to something kind of boring if it’s not committed to properly… fortunately, Over My Dead Body commits just enough to get the job done.
Over My Dead Body follows Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving) who are a couple going through a bit of a rough patch, like you do. Naturally the solution that both of them come to is that they have to kill their partner, like you do. During a little vacation in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, Dan tries to put his murder plan into action but is stopped by Lisa, who is about to put her own plan into action when a couple of escaped criminals make an appearance and throw off their plans.
In terms of dark comedy, Over My Dead Body is pitch black and it kind of revels in it. Not only is the entire premise incredibly dark and twisted, but every new development somehow keeps pushing it down further and further but always with just enough humour to keep it from being too bleak. Sure, it’s dark that the main couple plan on murdering each other but fortunately they’re so inept that the plans fail in spectacular fashion, culminating in more than a few moments that lead the audience to gasp in shock while also cackling at the absurdity. Now some of the ideas it’s playing with might be a little much (not gonna pretend the moment where the criminals want to play a game where the loser gets fucked against their will was the easiest scene to watch, despite the moments of genuinely funny comedy sprinkled in it) but most of the time it works.
Over My Dead Body works because of the combination of a genuinely clever script and a cast who are game to go with the insanity of it all. The script in particular is tight as a drum, building on everything so carefully to make sure each new wrinkle in the story is easy to follow and still surprising. It has a repeated gimmick of throwing out a revelation (usually someone new appearing in the film) and then flashing back to explain why and how they ended up at the cabin, before continuing on with the central story. It helps keep things from feeling completely arbitrary, there’s an understandable internal logic to the events that unfold even if it can get a little silly at times (which is fine, it’s a comedy, those have a habit of getting silly)
The big draw of Over My Dead Body is the cast who absolutely sell everything they have. Jason Segel reminds everyone why he was a major sitcom star for the better part of a decade with his absolutely brilliant ability to reach for the biggest laugh, Samara Weaving shows off just how badass and hilarious she can be with just a few lines and her accent turned up to 11 and of course the delightful Timothy Olyphant manages to be just mesmerizing and intimidating as Pete the escaped murderer. Arguably the scene stealer of the film is Juliette Lewis as Allegra who starts the film at a 12 and somehow finds further places to go. She’s a wrecking ball of energy that just slams through the movie and either makes a scene sing or just tears shit up in a way that’s undeniably captivating.
Most of the time Over My Dead Body plays to an extreme that really does work for most of it, but its big problem is that it kind of suffers from too many gear shifts too quickly. It starts strong with both main characters wanting to kill each other and then the criminals come in and the first plotline seems to just drop. Then the criminals want to get the money but that gets abruptly dropped in favour of the next plotline, and so on and so forth, leading to an ending that feels almost saccharine considering what came before. Not saying that the characters can’t grow over the film, indeed the ending itself is kind of what one would expect but the journey to get there feels abrupt. When you have a setup like “These spouses literally plan on killing each other”, it shouldn’t be so easy to just end that plotline when their emotions would’ve been building over so long. It just feels like a little more time was needed to make the transition through the extremes in tone work a little better, and really asking for more of a film feels like a somewhat odd critique to make but it’s the one I’ve got.
On the whole, Over My Dead Body is a wickedly dark little film with a bunch of very funny (though sometimes uncomfortable) moments that are beautifully presented by one of the better comedy casts in recent years. It’s absolutely not a film for everyone, the subject matter is touchy enough that I would be shocked if it had a large potential fanbase, but for those who like their comedy dark this is definitely a pretty good addition to the edgy comedy marathon.
Movie Meister Reviews 