{"id":541453,"date":"2026-03-15T06:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T06:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/541453\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T06:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T06:30:08","slug":"may-be-the-quintessential-sxsw-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/541453\/","title":{"rendered":"May Be the Quintessential SXSW Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSXSW<\/a> may be the only film festival where the quintessential movies that play there aren\u2019t just defining \u2014 they\u2019re practically a genre. Here are some of the qualities of what has come to be seen as the classic SXSW film. It is violent. It is funny. It is aggressive. It involves murder and mayhem executed in flamboyantly nonchalant ways. It is on some level an action ride, though a ride with attitude. It\u2019s smart about being debauched, and flippantly ironic about being smart. That\u2019s what gives it the hip factor that\u2019s the key to the SXSW secret sauce.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn that score, \u201cOver Your Dead Body<\/a>,\u201d which premiered at SXSW tonight, has to be one of the SXSW-iest movies I\u2019ve ever seen here. It\u2019s a film that starts with a simple premise and sucks you right in. Jason Segel<\/a> and Samara Weaving<\/a> play Dan and Lisa, a married couple who have come to despise each other. He\u2019s a director who made one movie and now directs pop-up commercials; she\u2019s an actress on the off-side of Off Broadway. They\u2019re doing a weekend at the cabin in upstate New York owned by Dan\u2019s crusty father (Paul Guilfoyle). It\u2019s just a getaway, but each of them has a hidden agenda. They\u2019re both planning to kill each other.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat sounds catchy, and also gimmicky (it\u2019s both), but the director, Jorma Taccona, who is one-third of The Lonely Island (he was the co-director of \u201cPop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping\u201d), stages the first chapter of \u201cOver Your Dead Body\u201d as a knowing and relatable portrait of festering marital discord. Dan, no surprise, is an inept killer, a bit like the William H. Macy character in \u201cFargo.\u201d Before he can chloroform Lisa, she winds up assaulting him with a taser; he wakes up bound to a chair, with his henchman \u2014 a low-grade flake named Henry (Jake Curran) \u2014\u00a0approaching her with a hammer. The unhappy couple wind up facing each other, descending into an argument where they come clean about all the rage they\u2019ve been bottling up inside.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis part of the film is witty and almost believable. \u201cOver Your Dead Body\u201d is a remake of the 2021 Norwegian film \u201cThe Trip,\u201d and the script, by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, has plenty of lived-in detail about the triggers that can build up over time in a marriage. Like the fact that Dan is a culinary fetishist who has ordered special red pepper from Ohio, or that he secretly believes that Lisa is a lousy actor, or her resentment of the flameout of his creativity, or his savage mockery of her Australian accent. For a while, we\u2019re more than happy to watch \u201cWho\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?\u201d redone as a bumbling homicidal duet.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that\u2019s only the appetizer. At a certain point, a shotgun is fired into the ceiling, and down crash three hooligans who have been hiding in the attic \u2014 two escaped convicts, Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), and Allegra (Juliette Lewis), the corrections-officer-turned-killer\u2019s-moll who has joined them. At that point, \u201cOver Your Dead Body\u201d becomes a very different film. It\u2019s now a bloody cat-and-mouse game of the most extreme kind \u2014\u00a0a spectacle of sadistic survivalism gone mad, all staged with a logistically brutal joy. There\u2019s a definite overtone of the Coen brothers in the way Jorma Taccone works. But it\u2019s as if he\u2019d taken off from the woodchipper scene of \u201cFargo\u201d and said, \u201cLet\u2019s just kept that going.\u201d The film keeps flashing back in time, overlapping the backstories of its characters, and that\u2019s part of its playful fizz.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOver Your Dead Body\u201d isn\u2019t a supernatural fantasy, but on some level it\u2019s as demented as the early \u201cEvil Dead\u201d films. Hands are stabbed, feet are liquidated, fingers are severed, bodies are impaled (at one point an entire butcher block of kitchen knives has to be used to subdue Todd), an ear and a nose are bitten off, shotgun holes are blown into faces, and prison rape is treated as a parlor game. Fun! And yet\u2026there\u2019s a bizarrely spontaneous, randomly unfolding logic to everything that happens. The film features a slew of genuine performances, which power up the violent insanity into something at once sensational and dramatic.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s starling how much nuance Segel and Weaving are able to pack into this debauched blender of mayhem. Segel makes Dan a bitterly perceptive geek, out of his depth but eager to prove himself, while Weaving invests Lisa with a snappishness that only camouflages her pain. With the right vehicle, Samara Weaving could be a major star. Two of the villains are milked for laughs, but part of the strategy is that they\u2019re played straight: Jardine\u2019s Todd is an old-style muscleman hulk, reminiscent of Dave Bautista, but the character is serious about his obsessions (which include \u201cHarry Potter\u201d), and his bulk is used as a comic force. Lewis makes Allegra a horny scamp, and Olyphant\u2019s Pete, the group ringleader, has a svelte savagery.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe violence gets more and more hyperbolic (by the time Dan\u2019s father crashes into the picture in a sports car, we\u2019ve entered a realm of madcap destruction), yet the whole thing remains tethered to the marriage of Dan and Lisa, who now, of course, team up in a couple-that-slays-together-stays-together way. Only the two never lose the ability to summon up their hate. \u201cOver Your Dead Body\u201d may on some level be a hyper-violent video game, but it\u2019s like a video game staged by Hitchcock. It\u2019s a lark, a gleeful bash of slaughter, a gonzo \u201cScenes from a Marriage,\u201d and a slapstick-nightmare comedy of dismemberment, one that wears its heart on its sleeve, along with a few other body parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SXSW may be the only film festival where the quintessential movies that play there aren\u2019t just defining \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,194409,344,268223,95471,63535],"class_list":["post-541453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-jason-segel","tag-movies","tag-over-your-dead-body","tag-samara-weaving","tag-sxsw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}