The co-stars of Jorma Taccone’s new Amazon black comedy Over Your Dead Body each bring with them a previous film that informs the tone of their new film. For Aussie Samara Weaving, that’s the Ready or Not films, in which family, blood or otherwise, become target practice at a secluded country estate. You have to go back a little further for Jason Segel’s contribution, which is The Five-Year Engagement, whose hard-edged, oddball energy plays out during the dissipation of a relationship that’s stalled on progressing to marriage. Over Your Dead Body most directly recalls last year’s The Roses, itself a loose remake of The War of the Roses from the 1980s, in which stewing mutual resentment results in a husband and wife at each other’s throats through desperate and comedic fisticuffs involving convenient household objects.

The result is a pretty darn good time at the movies, though probably not for the squeamish. There are other characters who factor into the central skirmish between a successful Hollywood director who’s been relegated to helming commercials, and his actress wife who cheated on him because he neglected their marriage and failed to help her career when he said he would. But first and foremost this is a battle between two familiar Hollywood types, who nonetheless convey an extreme version of the simmering frustrations in any marriage. While some would just fantasise over offing their partner, these two actually intend to do it.

They’re scheduled for a weekend away at a remote cabin owned by the director’s increasingly senile father (Paul Guilfoyle), and Segel’s Dan is carefully laying the groundwork for what he expects to happen. In getting together with a few close friends and relatives who will be able to bear witness later on, Dan talks about how his wife Lisa is planning a dangerous all-day solo hike in the mountains, making sure his reservations to this recklessness are on the record. He’s directed enough actors that his performance feels pretty convincing, and when they arrive at the cabin after a car ride replete with low-level squabbling, he’s got the chloroform ready to do the deed.

But Lisa isn’t as naïve and helpless a victim as he might expect. She whirls around and hits him in the chest with a stun gun, and soon he’s tied to a chair. See, she’s planning to use the excuse that this is conceived as a hunting weekend – even though both are anathema to guns – to her advantage. Accidents happen, right? The most believable excuse is sitting right there, and if he won’t use it, she will.

Of course, nothing goes as planned for either, and even when all the cards are on the table, it’s not so simple just to do away with the other – especially since everything has to be staged in conjunction with whatever story they’re going to tell the police. But each other are soon just the beginning of Dan and Lisa’s problems. There are three escaped convicts on the loose in these woods – played by Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis and Keith Jardine – and it isn’t clear which team these three new adversaries are going to play on, or if they’re just going to play on their own. Plus there’s the director’s friend, Henry (Jake Curran) – really just a hanger-on who wants to spend more time with him – who’s on hand to help Dan, but may have other ideas when he learns how much insurance money is actually at stake.

Taccone is known to us as one of the members of the comedy troupe The Lonely Island, which most prominently also includes actor Andy Samberg. Taccone has sat in the director’s chair almost as often as his fellow Islander Akiva Schaffer (2025’s The Naked Gun), and has the silly, over-the-top films MacGruber and Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping on his resume. Those films only prepare you somewhat for the tone of Over Your Dead Body, as this is undeniably a much darker film that still retains many zany elements. If you are expecting an extreme form of comedy on par with those others, you won’t necessarily be prepared for the way Body tries to at least exist within the realm of plausibility, and occasionally examines the real pain and disappointment that would drive a husband and wife to kill each other.

None of that prevents the film from being really light on its feet, and part of that buoyancy comes from a fun narrative structure and the trio of key supporting performances from Olyphant, Lewis and Jardine. The script by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney continues introducing new elements into the central dynamic, such as the arrival of these three new players, then loops back some number of hours or days to show what’s occurred to bring them to this point. Each time you’re worried about a whole scene playing out again, in a manner familiar from all the recent descendants of Groundhog Day, we get only a taste to reorient ourselves and then we move on.

To give you a further idea of the lighter tone, there’s a scene where the three escapees are forced to lie in wait, and because they’re bored, they start playing Charades. This goes on a lot longer than it needs to and enforces a career’s worth of committing to the joke by Taccone and his cohorts. Olyphant and Lewis are always great, but Jardine really shines as the muscle in their crew, whose presence is something similar to what Dave Batista might bring to the role.

Over Your Dead Body wouldn’t truly hit if it weren’t for the performances of Segel and Weaving. Both are suited to their roles broadly; Segel is not known for being particularly handsome, but his character’s success as a director has attracted a younger wife who is more traditionally beautiful, leaving him insecure about his standing with her. But each makes particular choices that defy the easiest optics of their situation, and it becomes clear that there was nothing opportunistic about their union, and they may have really loved each other. That doesn’t prevent them from genuinely wanting to kill each other right now, and the actors sell that with a great blend of frustration, fury and desperation, always remaining funny above all else.

 

Over Your Dead Body is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.