Over Your Dead Body

 

Take Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, swap out ballet for theatre, give it a distinctly Japanese spin, dial up the psycho-sexual insanity up, frame it around a ghost story and hand it over to director Takashi Miike and you’ll end up with Over Your Dead Body (referred to as OYDB from here on), a psychological horror film about stage theatre. It’s billed as a ‘wild cinematic detour’ for Takashi Miike, but it’s really not much of a detour at all really. Miike has made ghost stories before (‘One Missed Call’), and he’s done psycho-sexual horror-thrillers (‘Audition’). Over Your Dead Body is like a combination of these, but it comes up lacking. It’s a bit too slow and the payoff, while freaky, isn’t satisfying enough. Its premise is really interesting, but the film just doesn’t pull it off.

Miyuki is an actress in a theatre troupe, along with her distant boyfriend Kousuke. They’re doing a series of rehearsals for a production of a famous, popular play, ‘Yotsuya Kaidan’, a centuries-old horror tale of ghostly vengeance. In it an opportunistic ronin named Iemon (played by Kousuke after Miyuki gets him the part) secretly murders a man and marries his sickly daughter, Imu (played by Miyuki), to inherit their estate. She loves him, bears him an ill child and takes the brunt of his abuse, until he earns the affections of a much younger, far wealthier woman. He conspires with her family to kill Imu so he can remarry, and does so violently, but upon her death she curses him and her ghost takes violent revenge.

Real life begins to imitate the play, as Miyuki’s relationship with Kousuke begins to mirror that between Imu and Iemon. As the rehearsals continue, both Miyuki and Kousuke start struggling to separate reality from fiction as madness begins to take control.

OYDB is a very slow movie for its entire beginning hour. Two thirds of the movie is slow, building up atmosphere It is pretty atmospheric, with the few locales (the theatre, backstage, Miyuki’s apartment, a traffic stop at a construction site) becoming somewhat creepier as the film continues. The problem is the build-up isn’t very interesting for that first hour. Once the build-up is finally over though, it gets pretty freaky in quick order. When the play turns brutal in its final scenes, the film starts getting violent and creepy, with the brief moments of psychological uncertainty ramping up until it reaches its climax, where both the play and the character’s psyches reach violent ends.

It’s similar to the build-up in ‘Audition’, but here it’s far less interesting. Part of the reason is the dual-narrative – regularly switching between the Imu/Iemon rehearsal and the Miyuki/Kousuke backstage real-life dealings. The rehearsal scenes are long, drawn out and while they might be true to the Japanese play (I’ve no idea) they aren’t particularly engaging for the most part, or at least not in the beginning (it does get interesting towards the end). It takes a while before the rehearsal actually feels like a story, and by that stage it’s towards the end of the film. Alternatively, we really don’t spend that much time outside of the rehearsals, so our connection to the characters when they aren’t playing their roles is muted.

It’s also less effective overall because of a lack of a likeable lead. Kousuke is a total unlikeable douchebag from beginning to end, not even bothering to hide his constant philandering or blatant disinterest in Miyuki. Seeing him get his comeuppance isn’t as satisfying as it should be, partly because of how confusing the final twist is. Miyuki on the other hand turns out to be completely mental in a pretty severe way from the get-go (the big, rough, most ‘Miike-ish’ scene involves Miyuki with sterilised kitchen utensils in the shower). I really couldn’t sympathise much with her since she’s already strange at the beginning. The other characters aren’t much of a presence, neither within the play or the film, mostly there to incite or exacerbate more psychological tension between the couples.

The ending itself, despite the build-up, doesn’t make much sense and opens up a massive number of questions. The movie seemingly goes extremely supernatural and extremely psychological at the same time, which leaves some big confusing twists. Were the supernatural aspects real, imagined or just a red herring to trick the audience? Did the psychotic psychological stuff happen at all? No idea. The final twist itself is fairly familiar, but the details are so very confusing. A lot of the scares and big freaky moments in the film are of a similar nature, often unexplained.

OYDB is disappointing all up despite its few good aspects, but most of its faults can really be put to its premise, which is a shame because of how interesting it is in concept. The stage play makes up so much of the film that it really consumes it, which lessens the impact. The stage play stuff is done well though, with the set design and costumes looking and feeling exactly like what I’d assume they’d be for a real theatre production. The revolving stage and some of the sets are particularly impressive, even at the times when the play itself isn’t particularly compelling. The film overall is well shot on a technical level as well, with excellent use of darkness and shadows for the theatre scenes. The acting likewise is pretty decent, particularly towards the end where the characters aren’t so much as acting in a play but living it out.

On second thought, maybe calling it a ‘cinematic detour’ is the best way to describe the overall film. It’s basically a stage play itself, to the point where I could imagine Miike producing and directing a theatre production of the central ghost story. It certainly looks the part, and the film’s focus on it shows a passion for the theatrical arts. It’s a shame that it doesn’t come together particularly well. The elements are all there, and it is fairly effective in getting some chills in, but they don’t fit together into a satisfying whole and it just doesn’t pay off in the end.