Over Your Dead Body in on Prime Video
“Everything sounds so mean in your stupid fucking accent. It’s like British crossed with devil.”
Dan, a struggling American director, cannot stand his Australian wife Lisa, so he secretly plots to murder her during a retreat to their secluded cabin. What he doesn’t know is that Lisa is planning to kill him during the same stay. Their scheming turns bloodily chaotic when unexpected intruders crash their murder party.
Directed by Jorma Taccone, ‘Over Your Dead Body’ is based on the Norwegian action-comedy thriller The Trip (original title: I Onde Dager) and stars Samara Weaving as aspiring actor Lisa, while Jason Segel plays her husband, Dan. It’s hardly surprising that Weaving landed this role, considering she’s already become famous for turning marriage into mortal combat in ‘Ready or Not’ (she was also fantastic as the assassin in ‘Guns Akimbo’).
The first half of ‘Over Your Dead Body’ feels like an unhinged, ultra-violent version of the dark comedy The Roses, while the latter half shifts into a blood-soaked home invasion thriller. Unlike most relationship dramas, this 2026 film has the couple pulling out guns and knives within the opening minutes. There are no happy flashbacks or lingering traces of romance before they’re at each other’s throats. And thankfully so, it definitely didn’t need it.
Juliette Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, and Keith Jardine play a wacky trio of intruders who turn the story on its head after about 40 minutes. Suddenly, it’s no longer just Lisa versus Dan, or which spouse will literally get away with murder, but the couple against a clearly malevolent group of strangers who are after both their money and their lives.
Will the feuding couple put their homicidal grudges aside to fight the trio as a team, or somehow escape an impossible scenario where everyone dies except one of them, allowing the survivor to conveniently pin all the deaths on the cabin invaders? Or will the intruders triumph? Although, of course, since Samara Weaving and Jason Segel are the lead stars of ‘Over Your Dead Body’, one knows the last option is extremely unlikely. Unfortunately, the film becomes predictable in its final stretch, and the pacing also begins to sag.
There’s next to no onscreen chemistry between Jason Segel and Samara Weaving, which partially works for ‘Over Your Dead Body’ early on, since their characters are openly hostile and already despise each other. But there is simply no “will they, won’t they” tension between them, which makes the film’s eventual climax feel somewhat contrived. Lisa and Dan have more of a sibling rivalry energy than that of a once-in-love couple determined to kill each other. They do fine in their parts individually, but just mesh well together.
Samara Weaving is entertainingly irritating as the loud, passive-aggressive Lisa, while Jason Segel spends most of the film looking like a director who’s one bad day away from a nervous breakdown. Their constant bickering often feels less like a marriage in crisis and more like an extended Saturday Night Live sketch. In one scene, the pair mock each other’s failed careers before demonstrating to each other how they’ll act innocent after committing murder, almost like an acting audition. It’s an amusing idea, but the scene never quite finds the spiteful, theatrical bite needed to make it truly hilarious.
Paul Guilfoyle has a hilarious cameo as Michael, Dan’s passive-aggressive army veteran father, who, in one amusing foreshadowing scene, says, “I wish a war upon you.” In fact, plenty of twists in ‘Over Your Dead Body’ are conspicuously foreshadowed, such as a TV news report that lays the groundwork for the home invasion subplot in the second half.
What works best in ‘Over Your Dead Body’ are its gleefully over-the-top action-comedy elements, with the filmmakers going all out in scenes of blood and gore, almost as if this were an Evil Dead film. So if you can’t stomach bodies being ripped apart or fingers getting sliced to pieces, then this is definitely not the action comedy you want to stream. While the excessive violence is undeniably entertaining, the action itself is surprisingly restrained given how outrageous the plot is. A few more wildly choreographed fight scenes would have made the film a lot more fun.
Rating: 6 on 10. You can stream ‘Over Your Dead Body’ on Prime Video.
Find the writer on Twitter | Instagram
Read Next: Teach You a Lesson S1 Review: Gratifying Action-Fantasy Against Bullying
