Critics reviews

Half the film is a gorgeously shot dress rehearsal of the play in a stylised period setting on a state-of-the-art rotating stage, while the other half shows more or less the same drama unfolding in Miyuke's elegant, minimalist home – and these two parallel narratives bleed into one another in a deeply irrational manner, blurring the boundaries between theatre and film, antique and (post)modern, actor and character, the living and the dead.

Over Your Dead Body will certainly appeal to Miike's hardcore fan base, for his technical mastery of blood is on display throughout. I must admit that my interest in this sort of thing only goes so far, though I find the production model he's developed to be quite fascinating.

[In the cinema of Takashi Miike,] you never know what to expect going in, and often what to expect as the film unfurls. His tidy, arty horror-theatre film here, the neatly titled Over Your Dead Body, kept me off-guard for nearly its whole, brief length. I felt like I never had ground to stand on, it so immediately moves from opening scenes of a fucking couple to that couple splitting to go to work on dress rehearsals for a play of a ghost story...

For better or worse, one never has to wait more than a few months for the next Takashi Miike picture. Over Your Dead Body is one of his amusing mediocrities, and boasts a striking similarity, in its willful confusion of real life with rehearsals for a play, with Olivier Assayas' Clouds Of Sils Maria. The buildup is fairly tedious, apart from some striking set design... but the Grand Guignol finale is a fair bit of grotesque fun.