Over Your Dead Body Review: Samara Weaving Delights in ‘Murder Your Spouse’ Comedy

Dan does not love his wife. That would be apparent to anyone if they gave him the time of day. The Jason Segel character clumsily drops into conversation to every co-worker within earshot that he and the little lady are going to a cabin in the woods this weekend. More desperate still, are his lamentations about what he’d do if she got lost hiking up there. I’ve warned her not to go out alone, but she won’t listen!

Nobody pays Dan much mind, however. Nobody except the wife, Lisa (Samara Weaving), who dryly observes her husband the way an entomologist might consider an ant trying to roll a particularly jagged cookie crumb uphill. When he sheepishly serves her what he insists is “your favorite meal,” a rare steak with special peppercorn seasoning from Ohio, and out by a frigid lake that looks straight from The Godfather, Part II, she makes sure not to blink while stating “this isn’t ceviche.” Despite being introduced as a film director at the start of the story, Segel’s Dan has no idea what kind of movie he’s really in. But Lisa knows, and it is a devilishly amusing flick whenever Weaving’s mirthless grin spreads and the wife’s own murder games commence.

Based on a Tommy Wirkola movie I have not seen, Over Your Dead Body is still absolutely a Jorma Taccone joint: a new genre offering from one-third of the Lonely Island iconoclasts of SNL fame, as well as the director of comedy cult classics MacGruber and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. While certainly more grounded in a dramatic and even faintly thriller aesthetic, Over Your Dead Body views its characters and their problems from a skewed vantage dripping with contempt, and maybe a light seasoning of Midwest pathos. Dan and Lisa clearly deserve each other, and when they find themselves in a double-blind Patricia Highsmith scenario wherein both spouses are planning to whack the old ball and chain, the only real mystery is how bad it will get for both parties.

…Given their temperaments, it’s pretty likely things will play worse for Dan. After all, when he goes in with the chloroform, he’s still the one who wakes up in in the next scene tied to a chair.

Taccone’s structure, descended from Wirkola, is deviously knotty. Despite almost all of the present-tense action occurring in the cabin and its accompanying grounds, the filmmaker and screenwriters Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney jealously guard the details and context of this scenario, withholding critical information until it can at last be delivered like a twist within a twist, and each served with a side of mean-spirited giggles. When Dan first reaches the chloroform, we discover in a flashback Lisa much more elegantly has mentioned to her friends that her stupid husband is forcing her to go hunting for the first time this weekend. Cut to the present with her calmly holding a shotgun in her lap while reciting to her bound hubby: “Officer, I’m sorry. I told him we shouldn’t go out there in the dark, but I tripped and… it went off.”

Soon enough the twists, flashbacks, and structural gags are piling up to excesses of warm bodies in a Groucho Marx state room. There are more secrets, betrayals, and skeletons in this marriage than either participant can count—and the latter becomes literal after the unhappy couple discovers their swanky cabin has unintended visitors, including escaped convict Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and his runaway prison guard Allegra (Juliette Lewis).

Weaving is certainly having a moment in Austin this year, as Over Your Dead Body marking her second genre-bender to slay at the Paramount Theatre during SXSW. As with Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, Over Your Dead Body raises the question about why Weaving isn’t (yet) a bigger star since Lisa’s playful vindictiveness is strangely beguiling. Whether it is eviscerating Dan with a withering gaze or twisting the knife via lethal one-liner, the actor is feasting, on ceviche or otherwise, just as Taccone enjoys leaning into the Aussie actor’s background to carve out down under slang and eccentricities.

Segel is also used to good effect, inverting the lovable sad sack routine he’s practiced for nearly 20 years since How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but here for a protagonist so self-pitying that he thinks he’s still being a nice guy because he cooked his wife a fancy dinner before planning to send her to the bottom of a nearby lake. The slippery silliness of the script allows Taccone and company to lightly toy with the idea that this movie is also something of a rom-com where a couple in a rut gets some much needed excitement by working through their problems. In a certain sense, it’s as if their three unwelcome visitors in the cabin are just a manifestation of the couple’s ennui.

Fortunately, the ever bemused Taccone never loses sight that Dan and Lisa’s biggest common interest is a shared awfulness. If this is an extreme version of therapy, it’s not going to be completed without some physical and psychic scars.

Hence Taccone keeps the tone sleek and frothy. The remembered slights and disappointments are given texture by Weaving and Segel, but the movie is at heart a slightly more grounded SNL Digital Short, just this time playing in Hitchcock’s sandbox where murder isn’t so much a sin as a puzzle worth solving together. Where the movie does hit a snag in its scheming, though, is the more gruesome, elongated action set pieces, which feel part and parcel for Wirkola’s previous filmography. The Norwegian filmmaker has a tendency to lean on shock and schlock, and it working in his favor. But here it can come across as excessively cruel or garish when contextualized with Over Your Dead Body’s happy-go-lucky table-setting. There are several particularly brutal moments near the climax in which characters are threatened with heinous suffering, or are then inflicted with said pain, that are tonally discordant and jarring.

Such sequences can blemish and needlessly elongate an otherwise idyllic weekend in the country with these murder mates, but they do not particularly diminish what is an unabashedly winsome good time in the theater, especially with a rowdy crowd who can live vicariously through the vigorous couple’s counseling.

Over Your Dead Body premiered at SXSW on March 14 and opens in U.S. theaters on April 24.