May 27, 2023
by Carla Hay
Directed by Ho Cheuk Tin
Cantonese with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in Hong Kong, the comedy film “Over My Dead Body” features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Some residents and employees of a co-op apartment building try to hide the body of an unidentified naked man who was found in a hallway of the building.
Culture Audience: “Over My Dead Body” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching a shallow “screwball” comedy that makes no sense.
“Over My Dead Body” is a comedy that’s as creatively inert as a corpse. This repetitive and frequently incoherent movie, which is about people trying to hide a body, is plagued by annoying plot holes, scatterbrained characters and a foolish ending. And with a total running time of two hours, “Over My Dead Body” is entirely too long for the movie’s flimsy story.
Directed by Ho Cheuk Tin and Kong Ho-Yan, “Over My Dead Body” is about several residents and employees of a Hong Kong co-op apartment building trying to hide the body of an unidentified naked man in his 30s (played by Kenneth Cheung), who was found in a hallway of the building. There’s also a clumsy subplot about a young woman who doesn’t live in the building but is getting married. Don’t try to make any sense of what happens in this moronic film, which quickly grows tiresome with all the shrieking and yelling over what do to about this stranger’s body.
“Over My Dead Body” begins by showing the family members who end up discovering the body outside their apartment unit. The apartment building, located in Hong Kong’s Sha Tin district, is an upscale, 25-floor building called Seaside Heights, which has 100 apartment units. Seaside Heights is marketed as evoking an “exquisite French lifestyle,” according to an ad shown in the movie.
There’s really nothing French about this apartment building. It’s just an excuse for the movie to have a bizarre fantasy sequence of many of the apartment building residents dressed in 18th century-styled French costumes, as if they’re about to have tea with Marie Antoinette. The movie has even more weirdness—and not in a good way.
There are five family members living in the apartment unit where the body is found outside the unit. Before this shocking discovery, tensions were already running high in the family. The apartment unit is owned by divorcée Meghan So (played by Teresa Mo), who is the household’s primary source of income.
Meghan shows a lot of resentment over having to carry most of the financial burden for everyone in the household. Also living in the household is Meghan’s daughter Yana Chung (played by Jennifer Yu), a flight attendant whose husband Ming To (played by Wong You Nam) is currently unemployed. Yana and Ming have an adorable daughter named Yoyo (played by Lau Ying Yu), who’s about 5 years old.
Meghan has another child named Kingston Chung (played by Alan Yeung Wai Lun, also known as Yeung Wai Lun), Yana’s goofy younger brother who is also unemployed. However, Meghan shows much more tolerance for Kingston than she does for Yana. Kingston says he will be able to make money when he launches his “brand.” The movie later reveals that Kingston wants to start a company called the Anti-Facial Social Club, which sells facial stickers designed to prevent facial recognition done by technology.
One of the early scenes in the movie shows Meghan clashing with Yana and Ming when the spouses talk about their desire to move out so they can have more space to raise Yoyo. Meghan warns the couple that it would be expensive for Yana and Ming to get their own place on the couple’s limited income. This leads to more complaining from Meghan about how she has to pay most of the living expenses in the household.
During this argument, someone happens to open the front door to the apartment unit. The arguing family members are shocked to see a naked man slumped on the hallway floor in front of the unit. No one in the family knows who he is and have never seen this stranger before.
When they determine that the man is dead, everyone except Meghan immediately wants to call for help. Kingston goes as far as dialing 999 (the emergency number in Hong Kong), but Meghan forces him to hang up before he can say what the problem is. Meghan yells at everyone that if the news got out that there was a naked dead man found in the building, then the building’s property value will decrease.
The rest of the movie shows various people finding out about the body and trying to hide it too. An elderly couple named Boron Chan (played by Lau Kong) and Betty Chan (played by Bonnie Wong), who are retired schoolteachers, are very superstitious. They want to hide the body because they think if they don’t hide the body, then people will think the building is haunted. Boron is also the treasurer for this co-op building.
A bachelorette named Mary Tse (played by Grace Wu) is described as a “young single mother” who is very protective of her baby, which she covers up in a carriage when she goes out in public. But surprise! It’s revealed early on in the movie that Mary’s “baby” is really a small dog. Dogs are not allowed in the building.
Meghan threatens to tell the building management that Mary has a dog, which is why Mary goes along with the plan to hide the body. Mary has a maid named Nancy (played by Valenzuela Lucy Navarette), who gets ensnared in the body-hiding conspiracy because Mary threatens to have Nancy deported back to Thailand if she doesn’t cooperate. “I’m from the Philippines,” Nancy tells Mary. This is what’s supposed to pass as “comedy” in “Over My Dead Body.”
Other people who get involved in hiding the body are a taxi driver named Bear Cheung (played by Ronny Cheng), who lives in the building and has a strained relationship with his son Mesai Cheung (played by Edan Lui), who is in his early 20s. Bear and Mesai have lived together, ever since Bear’s wife/Edan’s mother (played by Xenia Chong, shown in flashbacks) left them and had a bitter divorce. Mesai blames Bear for the breakup of the marriage.
Mesai is a video game/computer enthusiast. Somehow, he has found a way to hack into the building’s video surveillance system. It becomes a subplot in the movie when the building’s security chief S.G. Lee (played by Jiro Lee) finds out about the body too. S.G. Lee brags that he knows who all the building residents are, but he does not know who the mysterious nude man is and how he got into the building.
As already revealed in the trailer for “Over My Dead Body,” some of the apartment dwellers end up in a jail cell, where they meet a bride-to-be named Sue Yu (played by Hanna Chan), who gets mixed up in this awful mess. And where is Yoyo during all of these silly antics? She’s conveniently kept out of sight for most of the movie, which only shows Yoyo for some “cute kid” moments.
“Over My Dead Body” is a stagnant cesspool of irritating characters shrieking, hollering, and doing things that never look believable. None of the acting in this movie is any good. The movie’s direction and film editing are often unfocused, jumping from one character to the next in clumsy ways. The sloppy screenplay leaves no room for character development.
The movie saved the worst parts for last. In the movie’s last 15 minutes, when it’s revealed who the mystery stranger is, “Over My Dead Body” takes an abrupt turn into phony sentimentality. The movie, which was already failing to be amusing, tried to be an edgy and irreverent satire about status-conscious people for most of the story. In the end, “Over My Dead Body” just turns into a huge, mushy plothole that insults viewers’ intelligence.
Illume Films and Imagi Crystal Studio released “Over My Dead Body” in select U.S. cinemas on May 19, 2023. The movie was released in Hong Kong on March 24, 2023.
