A dysfunctional marriage, a remote lakeside cabin and two people who have each, separately, decided the weekend would go better if their spouse never drove home — that is the gleefully nasty premise of Over Your Dead Body, and director Jorma Taccone plays it for maximum carnage. Dan, a washed-up filmmaker, and Lisa, the actress wife whose career he quietly stalled, head out for a getaway meant to save what is left of them. Both have packed an ulterior motive. What neither has planned for is the pair of escaped convicts who kick the door in and turn two would-be murderers into reluctant teammates.

Taccone — the Lonely Island alumnus behind MacGruber — works from a script by sketch duo Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, and the whole thing carries the action pedigree of 87North, the David Leitch shop that made Nobody and Bullet Train. It is an English-language remake of Tommy Wirkola’s 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, and it keeps that movie’s lethal swing between marital farce and splatter: the practical gore is the headline attraction, grotesquely inventive carnage that earns gasps and laughs in the same beat.

The escaped-convict turn is what rescues the couple and the comedy. Timothy Olyphant, all menace and deadpan, leads the home invasion alongside Keith Jardine’s Todd, while Juliette Lewis turns up as a corrections officer on their trail. Suddenly the two spouses who spent the first act trying to engineer each other’s accidents have to keep each other breathing, and the film’s nastiest joke is how much better they function as a team once the target is somebody else.

Samara Weaving and Jason Segel in Over Your Dead Body (2026) — Samara Weaving and Jason Segel in *Over Your Dead Body* (2026). 87North Productions / XYZ Films.

It belongs, mostly, to Samara Weaving, who has quietly become one of the genre’s most reliable leads and proves an unexpectedly precise comic actor here, pivoting from terror to slapstick without dropping the thread. Jason Segel plays Dan for rumpled, self-pitying laughs, and that mismatch is also the film’s soft spot — he is tuned to comedy while she is tuned to horror, and the two registers do not always meet in the middle. For all his energy, Taccone struggles to hold the tone steady, and a couple of sequences push the dark-comedy license further than the material can carry.

Critics split almost down the middle — 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 52 on Metacritic — and that feels about right: this is less a subversive reinvention than a well-built, gnarly genre machine that does exactly what it sets out to do. After a SXSW premiere and a brief theatrical run, it arrived on Prime Video as the kind of mean, funny, blood-slicked couch movie you start with low expectations and finish grinning. Over Your Dead Body will not change anyone’s life, but it will absolutely ruin a date night, in the best possible way.