Over Your Dead Body

My favorite movie of 2020 is Spontaneous. If you haven't seen it, I strongly recommend it. It concerns what happens in a small town when students at the local high school start spontaneously exploding. That is how it is sold in just about every plot summary and log line you find. There's no mention of how the movie changes genres twice (and does so with sublime grace), the gallows humor, or the social commentary. It sells you on a premise and, despite pivoting how it presents the premise, it stays true to the sales pitch. This is essential, because there must be trust between the storyteller and the audience. It's okay to make a turn or introduce a twist, but the core must remain intact. It's why Psycho can get away with killing what appears to be its primary protagonist a third of the way in and keep going; because the story was never about her. It's in the name. Over Your Dead Body sells itself as a hybrid of sorts between The War Of The Roses and wilderness survival horror movies. You know, where one person lures another out into the woods and it becomes a cat-and-mouse game of survival and people hunting each other. A couple go to their cabin in the woods ostensibly to reconnect and work on their failing marriage, when really both are plotting to murder the other. That right there is enough for a movie. Slow drip the tension, sprinkle in plenty of gallows humor, all hell breaks loose but instead of a hunter/hunted dynamic, it's a back-and-forth battle, like evenly matched sports teams. Jason Segal plays a dweebish, milquetoast guy who feels emasculated and rudderless in his life (good casting), and Samara Weaving plays his younger wife who married looking for stability and instead got turbulence. I'm on board. Cool. And then the second act kicks in and the movie stops being its premise and instead becomes a home invasion movie with escaped convicts hiding in the attic. And I'll give credit where I can in that the performances of the three criminals is great. Timothy Olyphant is having fun, Juliette Lewis is a blast, and Keith Jardine is silly, doofy fun. The chemistry in all directions is working overtime to satisfy the audience. There's a lot more carnage than you'd expect, the dark humor is funny, and there's some poignant catharsis in the end. But it is not the movie I was sold. It takes a premise I love -- War Of The Roses with murder and carnage -- and turns it into something I've seen a million times, and despite the chemistry of the cast and the mayhem, it doesn't do it particularly well. The script requires massive moments of idiocy for the plot to happen, and superhuman tolerances for pain and bodily damage from everyone involved. I was never bored, but I did spent an hour or so grieving the movie I didn't get, and kind of annoyed by the movie I got. And if I'd known about the shift, I don't know if I'd have bothered. So, consider yourself warned if you're interested in this. You'll probably still have fun, but if you want what the teaser sells, you're going to wind up with something very different.