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Review | Over My Dead Body movie review: The Sparring Partner director makes a wacky comedy out of Hong Kong’s absurd property market and messy political climate
- Director Ho Cheuk-tin’s silly, harmless and even slightly hopeful feature, starring Teresa Mo, Ronald Cheng and Wong You-nam, may touch a few political nerves
- After a dead body is found outside a luxury apartment, the whole block does whatever they can to smuggle it out so their property prices aren’t affected
Reading Time:2 minutes
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3.5/5 stars
Can you build an entire feature-length movie around one laughably stupid pun?
That is, one imagines, exactly the challenge taken on by the makers of Over My Dead Body, a comedy drama whose wacky story revolves around a “male corpse” – which in Cantonese sounds the same as “blue ribbon”, a politically loaded term that refers to the pro-government camp during the 2019 Hong Kong protests.
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Ho Cheuk-tin, who directed the film from a screenplay co-written by Kong Ho-yan and producer Amy Chin Siu-wai, has arguably displayed just enough raw talent and confidence to pull off the unusual feat.
Ho’s directing debut The Sparring Partner, the front-runner at this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards with 16 nominations, goes into gruesome detail to dramatise a real-life double homicide case – only to end up resonating with the audience most for the thrill of truth-seeking that it indirectly conveys.
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His aptitude for crafting conceptually adventurous, aesthetically considered movies out of unlikely premises is again on display in Over My Dead Body. By the time it reaches that dreaded wordplay, when a single woman laments the presence of a “male corpse” in her flat, the film has already spent an hour lampooning the city’s absurdly inflated property market.
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