Gnarly marital mess bleeds between genres in Over Your Dead Body

The real problem for the couple is that their dueling murder plots are interrupted, not just by the Lifetime-meets-true-crime crossover device of their shared attempted-murder-cute, but by a handful of much more dangerous characters. Over Your Dead Body is quite literally crashed by two escaped convicts, Todd and Pete (Keith Jardine, Timothy Olyphant), and the guard Allegra (Juliette Lewis) helping them, who seem like—rather than prison—they’ve just escaped from a much sillier, broader, better Coen brothers knock-off.

The ensuing action-comedy of errors has very little to do with the aforementioned premeditation, instead becoming a goofy home invasion thriller, where gore is played for laughs and characters are merely containers for blood and mannequins for wounds. The relationship between Pete and Allegra offers a potential mirror for the domestic squabbles between Dan and Lisa, but by the time they drop in, the latter two have pivoted away from killer couples’ therapy towards mere survival. This is no bloodsoaked version of The Ref, despite groaners from the fugitives like “you two deserve each other.” That’s a shame, since Segel and Weaving are better at the twisted tone of the opening, where their spousal bickering over murder method and body disposal plans echoes the kind of everyday conflicts found in any relationship. But that throughline fades as soon as the trio of outsiders show up, replaced with punchlines about Harry Potter and prison rape.

It’s not like Dan and Lisa must rekindle their relationship as they figure out how to escape. Rather, they must persist through a series of fights and flashbacks, filled with gore that’ll make any midnight crowd gasp-laugh. And, to be sure, Over Your Dead Body certainly likes to brutalize its bodies. Shotguns, kitchen knives, lawnmowers, rakes, hammers, billiard balls, teeth, nails—the film deploys everything in the cabin to tear its inhabitants apart. Jardine and Lewis weather their beatings most entertainingly, one a hulking lug and the other a cruel idiot, both more in tune with the tone of the film than either lead. And Olyphant, for his part, has just enough blockheaded swagger to place him in that divine echelon of crooked Coens dweebs.

Taccone luxuriates in the physical destruction of these characters, wreaking the full cartoon overkill of MacGruber on criminals and couple alike. And yet, without any real winking, Over Your Dead Body tends to agree with the crotchety reactionary pap spouted by Dan’s dad: All this soft generation needs, to save itself and to save its relationships, is some violence to make it man up. It’s a grim takeaway from this relatively weightless film, but it’s also the only real throughline found between the two movies jammed into Over Your Dead Body—the smirking relationship tale and the splattery cabin-in-the-woods flick where Weaving is, once again, a final girl with less to do than she deserves.

Director: Jorma Taccone
Writer: Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney
Starring: Jason Segel, Samara Weaving, Paul Guilfoyle, Keith Jardine, Timothy Olyphant, Juliette Lewis
Release Date: April 24, 2026