Another entry in our recent deluge of ironic gorefests, Over Your Dead Body doesn’t really give us anything new, although for its first half at least, the picture gets by on some verve and a modicum of intelligence. Based on the 2022 Norwegian film The Trip (which I haven’t seen), it’s the story of a failed director and his struggling actress wife who have made plans to kill each other during a weekend trip to their cabin in the woods. Sensitive wannabe auteur Dan (Jason Segel) has meticulously prepared for how he’s going to do away with and dispose of Lisa (Samara Weaving) without causing her a lot of pain; he’s even cooked an elegant final meal for her, complete with special peppercorns he’s had shipped from Ohio. She, on the other hand, has a blunter, more direct plan to do away with him, in keeping with her brusque, no-bullshit nature. Naturally nothing goes according to plan, but until the film loses itself amid a mélange of forced twists and garish violence, it demonstrates a surprising degree of heart.

Directed by the Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone (who made MacGruber and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and has thus earned a lifetime of get-out-of-jail-free cards) and written by Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney, Over Your Dead Body bounces back and forth in time to justify the various turns of its story, but its true strength lies, believe it or not, in the care given to exploring Dan and Lisa’s marriage. Early scenes of them driving to their cabin and settling in demonstrate their passive-aggressive relationship, and we see just how poisonous they are around each other as they bicker over tiny, pointless things: a lost sweater, a favorite meal, the length of Lisa’s baths. Segel’s patented, towering awkwardness — he’s a huge dude who looks like you could knock him over with a pillow, both physically and emotionally — (mis)matches nicely with the vulgar, almost animalistic glint in Weaving’s eyes. For a while, Taccone and his cast deftly handle the comic melancholy of their seemingly banal exchanges, each marital nitpick a grinning little pinprick to the soul.

Then, alas, the genre plot kicks in. By the time a trio of prison escapees led by Timothy Olyphant shows up, the actual pleasures of this film have already threatened to dissipate. Now, the dynamism of the first half, which came with some delicate character development, spirals into diminishing returns. Turns out this is not the dark marital comedy that was initially promised and briefly delivered. Instead, it’s yet another comic cornucopia of stabbings, exploding heads, shredded bodies, prison-rape gags, and (of course, it’s 2026) multiple accidental discharges. To be clear, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with gore, funny or otherwise. But once the mayhem starts, Over Your Dead Body is not clever or artful enough to really wow us — and it really wants to wow us.

One more thing. All these genre movies that eventually devolve into a few people chasing each other around a house have gotten a bit tiresome. Once upon a time, such limitations seemed like an industrious solution to the challenges of a limited budget, and the results could be appropriately unnerving. An isolated cabin in the woods. A remote compound. The old family home. Hell, the new family home. Such settings should ideally produce a sense of entrapment or claustrophobia, with nobody available to help. (Haunted-house stories predate the movies by a few centuries, after all.) But in recent years, it feels like this is just what everything turns to — not just horror movies, by the way — and it’s become increasingly dispiriting. We understand that indie productions can’t afford multiple locations or extras anymore. But do they have to be this unimaginative?