Few pleasures in contemporary cinema compare to the pleasure of watching and hearing Samara Weaving scream. In that sense, the Australian actress really is this generation’s true scream queen—her supermodel beauty is undeniable, of course, but it’s just as impossible not to notice the angular, oblique, faintly outsider presence she brings to the characters she plays. Part of that rebelliousness, which seems innate, lies in the visceral quality of many of her performances, expressing stress and suffocation to the boiling point, when her characters often explode into guttural outbursts of rage. 

The scream is her instrument, as much as it is the horror star’s. In times so restrained and academic for the genre, it’s always cathartic to watch her scream, and that’s the energy she brings to Over My Dead Body. It’s a shame that, beyond Weaving and her shriek, the film connects so little with what is most interesting about its material.

Adapted from the Norwegian feature The Trip (2021, released in Brazil by Netflix), Over My Dead Body is the story of failed filmmaker Dan (Jason Segel) and actress Lisa (Weaving), who travel one weekend to an isolated cabin in the mountains under the pretense of trying to save their deteriorating marriage. The catch is that both of them are, separately, planning to kill the other—both to get rid of a partner they can no longer stand and to collect insurance money that could pull them out of debt.

Part of the film’s premise is to operate in the vein of toxic-relationship comedy that fueled The Roses, to cite a recent example. The screenplay by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney (writing partners since their time on Saturday Night Live in 2016) has some bite in that regard, finding plausible reasons for these two characters to hate each other and thus establishing the palpable atmosphere of resentment that dominates the first act. Maybe the work is even a little too effective, in fact, since it’s hard to buy the sugary turn Over My Dead Body chooses to take near the end.

Weaving and Segel make terrific scene partners, with his commitment to the grumpy, methodical Dan proving the perfect counterweight for the actress to calibrate her woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The film soars when it focuses on their exchanges, generating exactly the kind of irritation and the kind of comedy it wants to generate—which is also, of course, a sign of director Jorma Taccone’s (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) fluency in the genre. 

Over My Dead Body, in the end, never loses the comic timing of the joke at its core, doing a solid job of mining the absurdity of its premise. Less successful is its attempt to be a bloody action movie with horror-adjacent instincts, a bent that was much more pronounced in the Nordic original—the director of The Trip, Tommy Wirkola, is better known for the Dead Snow franchise and Violent Night. Taccone clearly has more affinity for polished, and in a way harmless, Hollywood comedy than for the deliberately schlocky splatter that dominates the Norwegian filmmaker’s movies.

The result is a handful of fight sequences that lose their grip on the euphoria and distress essential to a good gore fest, and a film that, overall, rarely seems to come close to that very specific territory. Unlike Weaving’s scream—and it’s worth saying that it’s here too, very well deployed, thank you very much—Over My Dead Body doesn’t offer the real catharsis that fuels so many people’s love for the genres it brushes up against.

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Over Your Dead Body

2026

105 min

Country: EUA

Duração: 105 min

Director(s): Jorma Taccone

Screenplay: Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney

Cast: Juliette Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Samara Weaving, Jason Segel, Paul Guilfoyle

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