Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Over Your Dead Body Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 5, 2016

Takashi Miike is such a prolific filmmaker that attempting to rein in his oeuvre to an easily describable pattern can be an exercise in futility. Miike is frequently thought of as a modern purveyor of a kind of hyperbolic horror sensibility, as evidenced by Ichi the Killer and Audition, but simply taking into account the last two films of Miike’s that I personally reviewed, Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City and Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai , proves that this is not always a workable thesis. Miike obviously has far ranging interests, and his remake of the iconic Harakiri shows that he is obviously well aware of tradition and (perhaps just as important) actual history, both in terms of film and Japanese culture generally. Both of those interests would seem to be able to serve Miike well in Over Your Dead Body, a film which offers a kind of “meta” take on a well known Japanese ghost story, but the result is oddly listless a lot of the time, due at least in part to the fact that the very “meta” aspect tends to divorce the horror from the actual presentation.

The venerable Ronald Colman won an Academy Award for Best Actor in A Double Life for his portrayal of addled actor Anthony John, a performer who starts to mistake his title role in Othello for “real life,” leading to murderous consequences. There’s something at least tangentially similar at play (literally) in Over Your Dead Body, which finds a coterie of actors preparing to stage a version of Yotsuya Kaidan, evidently one of the most, if not the most, famous ghost stories in the pretty stuffed Japanese canon of such tales. Yotsuya Kaidan is a tale of spectral revenge, one which follows a scheming rōnin’s attempt to marry well, leading to some disastrous events which ultimately find the ghost of the man’s wife wreaking considerable havoc.

One of the issues facing Western audiences coming to Over Your Dead Body is the fact that many will probably not be overly familiar with the underlying ghost story which informs the film. That in and of itself presents a disconnect of sorts that may be a relatively insurmountable obstacle for those not willing to simply go with the flow and let Miike’s typically florid sensibilities unspool in what does ultimately become a fitfully interesting horror entry. But the early going in Over Your Dead Body is made up mostly of snippets from the underlying source material, and some of that narrative is so elided here that it becomes a bit hard to follow.

In the "meta" realm, a famous actress named Miyuki Goto (Ko Shibasaki) has signed on to play Oiwa, the character who becomes a vengeful ghost, in a new production of Yotsuya Kaidan. Though he’s not especially well known, Miyuki gets her possibly abusive lover, actor Kosuke Hasegawa (Ebizo Ichikawa), cast as Tamiya Iemon, the rōnin in Yotsuya Kaidan. And, exactly like the character he’s playing, Kosuke ends up cheating on Miyuki with (predictably) the “third wheel” in the dysfunctional romance, actress Rio Asahina (Miho Nakanishi), who is playing the “new” love interest in Yotsuya Kaidan. Unfortunately Kikumi Yamagishi's screenplay doesn't really offer up these plot points with much specificity, and when combined with the kind of interstitial structure that's employed, one where the film ping pongs back and forth between the play and "real life," things can get positively confounding at times.

And yet that very feeling of consternation seems to be a deliberate strategy on the part of both Yamagishi and Miike, at least as evidenced by what might be described as a kind of Groundhog Day ambience where various vignettes are revisited, as if the characters are either reexperiencing them or are perhaps lost in fantasy worlds of their own making. It’s interesting to contrast this approach with A Double Life. There, an obviously more literal take on some shared plot elements meant that Anthony John’s mental degradation was depicted in an “objective” fashion, meaning that once things devolved to the point of murder, it was completely apparent that an actual killing was taking place. Here, in Over Your Dead Body, there’s no such certainty, and in fact the film is deliberately obfuscatory at times, leaving events open to a certain amount of interpretation.

Miike fans, at least fans of his more over the top horror fests, may find Over Your Dead Body strangely tamped down in that regard, though things do finally tip over into some expected gore. What’s actually more interesting about the film is its odd blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy. As is typically the case with Miike’s films, there’s no dearth of nicely done production design and even general filmcraft, but the story is too bifurcated to ever achieve the chills that Miike is so well known for delivering.

Over Your Dead Body Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Over Your Dead Body is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer. This appears to have been digitally shot, though technical data is rather sparse to come by. The image is generally decently sharp and well detailed, but a lot of the film takes place in the shaded environs of the theater, and here shadow detail is often minimal and a general murk often casts a rather hazy appearance over these sequences. There are also recurrent issues with rather noticeable noise and/or compression artifacts throughout many of the darker scenes, with almost pixellated yellow splotches regularly showing up. In brightly lit environments, things pop considerably better, and fine detail is often excellent in close-ups.

Over Your Dead Body Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Over Your Dead Body features the original Japanese language track in both DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0, as well as an English dub in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. My hunch is most audiophiles will want to stick with the original language option in its surround iteration, though this is not really a sonic showcase in any meaningful sense. There's excellent attention paid to variant ambiences as the film segues from the theater to other locations, but aside from a couple of startle effects and individually placed sound effects, immersion is relatively subtle most of the time. Dialogue is always offered cleanly and clearly and is well prioritized.

Over Your Dead Body Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:03)

Over Your Dead Body Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Over Your Dead Body is another at least intermittently interesting piece from Miike, but unfortunately it never really hangs together very well. The Kabuki source material is absolutely fascinating, and had it been woven more organically into this kind of soap operatic story of petulant actors, things might have attained a greater degree of connection. What may distress a lot of Miike fans is how restrained a lot of this film is. Over Your Dead Body can almost be seen as a follow-up or at least a sibling of sorts to Audition, though in this case the Performance (so to speak) isn't always compelling. Technical merits are generally good (video) to excellent (audio) for those considering a purchase.