Jorma Taccone Directs Over Your Dead Body Remake With Segel
jorma taccone has moved from broad comedy into an action thriller with Over Your Dead Body, a remake of the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip. The shift is notable because the film is billed as a black comedy, and the source frames that kind of theatrical comedy as a shrinking breed.
The movie stars Jason Segel as Dan, a once-promising filmmaker reaching the tail end of his career, and Samara Weaving as Lisa, his former collaborator. Their cabin getaway turns into a murder pact built around chloroform, tasers, and staged hunting accidents.
Segel and Weaving Drive the Setup
Jason Segel and Samara Weaving carry the central pairing, and the film leans on a grim premise rather than broad punch lines. Dan and Lisa plan to kill each other, which gives Taccone a darker lane than the one he used in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and MacGruber.
The cast also includes Timothy Olyphant as Pete and Juliette Lewis as Allegra. A group of escaped convicts arrives at the lakeside home, pushing the movie further into chaos and giving the remake a second pressure point beyond the couple’s own feud.
The Coen and Raimi Echoes
The film is described as indebted to the Coen brothers and Sam Raimi, and that lineage fits the material’s mix of black comedy, sex, gore, and marital discord. The result is built around Mexican standoffs and bloody lawn-mower violence, not the kind of studio-safe comedy that once had a clearer path to theaters.
Taccone’s earlier credits matter here because he is not arriving from a thriller background. He previously made two films, and he also worked as a writer on Saturday Night Live, so this remake reads as a deliberate move into darker material rather than a side step.
Theatrical Comedy Gets Scarcer
The Atlantic opened its review with, “One of comedy’s best leading men returns to cinemas with … an action thriller?” and then added, “The best way to sneak a comedy into theaters these days, it seems, is to make it a crime drama.” That framing puts Over Your Dead Body in the business reality facing theatrical comedy now: if it wants a screen, it may need a body count.
That is where Taccone’s turn lands best. He is using a remake of The Trip to smuggle black comedy back into theaters through an action-thriller wrapper, and the cast gives the project enough recognizable names to sell the joke before the gore arrives.
