Even Hollywood’s Funniest People Have to Compromise

The best way to sneak a comedy into theaters these days, it seems, is to make it a crime drama. Over Your Dead Body is billed as the latest effort from the director Jorma Taccone—a surprising name to be attached, considering his filmography. His previous features are Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Mac Gruber, two of the better comedies released in the 2010s (back when such things still regularly appeared in cinemas). But that résumé sits somewhat uncomfortably against a poster with five stone-faced actors wielding guns and knives—announcing a rather grim-looking thriller in which blood will be shed and tough life lessons learned. What a riot.Taccone’s film is certainly much more serious than the spoofy, anarchic projects he’s made in the past, including his work as a writer on Saturday Night Live. But it’s still, at its core, an attempt at a riotous black comedy, one indebted to obvious masters of the form such as the Coen brothers and the more horror-adjacent auteur Sam Raimi. Over Your Dead Body is a remake of the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, and Taccone is doing his best to maintain its transgressive Nordic roots by mixing sex, gore, and deep marital discord with carefree aplomb. The movie is bleak, but it’s brazen enough to sometimes recall Taccone’s earlier, punchier work. With films of that ilk now a dying breed, even just bringing them to mind is perhaps the most that fans of his humor can hope for.Over Your Dead Body follows a married couple whose relationship is beyond shipwrecked. Dan (played by Jason Segel) is a once-promising filmmaker reaching the tail end of his career; Lisa (Samara Weaving), his wife, is an actor and his former collaborator. They can’t stand each other. They journey to a cabin for an ostensible getaway, but the script, by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, makes clear almost immediately that the pair have designs beyond relaxation: They are both planning to murder the other, and have dueling elaborate schemes—chloroform, tasers,