“Sometimes I wish that play was my real life.”

Master of the genre, Takashi Miike, embraces the slow-building art of kabuki theater to deliver bloodbaths and brain wrinkles

Takashi Miike gets a free pass at this point when it comes to horror. He’s become as acclaimed of a name in the genre as Craven, Carpenter, or any of the heavy hitters that have become synonymous with bloodshed. With the voracity that Miike releases films, their quality can fluctuate all over the map, but the mark of a new release of one of his pictures is always occasion for excitement.

I’m a big Miike fan, and in fact, his more recent endeavor, As the Gods Will, is actually one of my favorite films of all time. By dabbling in all sorts of different genres through the years, the auteur’s skills have seen refinement in dazzling ways (just watch the trailer for his friendly, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney adaptation, for example) that have made him an even better fit for the genre that made his name. The director has such an adept hand at all different sorts of horror, with Over Your Dead Body seeing him do something here that’s simultaneously more restrained, yet still chaotic. This is hardly Miike’s strongest work, but that doesn’t mean that it still isn’t expertly handled. It will take up residency within your subconscious long after the rolling of the end credits. Even if you think that the film didn’t affect you, you may be surprised at how Over Your Dead Body will continue to eke to the forefront of your thoughts much later. It has that sort of twisted magic to it.

The circular story of the film looks at a production of the stage play, Makato Yotsuya Kaidan (which is based on an actual 1825 kabuki stage play), getting ready for a run in a theater. The play explores a lot of the typical tropes of the samurai genre, digging deeply into the themes of honor, love, and revenge. Kosuke (Ebizo Ichikawa) stars as the conflicted Iemon, whose union with Oiwa is put under pressure when his commitment to his trade is put on the line. This relationship sees further complication by the fact that Miyuki (Ko Shibasaki), Kosuke’s wife, is the one playing Oiwa in the production. Life continues to imitate art as Kosuke begins to have an affair with Rio (Miho Nakanishi), the actress playing Ume in the show, Kosuke’s new betrothed. If all of this has your head spinning, that’s part of the point. But Miike does a wonderful job at blurring the contents of this old piece of theater with real life right from the jump.

Over Your Dead Body is a very slow boil of a movie and honestly feels more akin to the glacial Audition than any other of Miike’s films. The picture takes its time, relishing moments where it can build dread. You’re waiting in fear the whole time for when the other shoe is going to drop, and then before you know it there are ghost dolls crying in the dark. This film will go to 100, smack the breaks on you, and then rack the speed back up. It’s a delirious tempo that meshes quite well with the film.

The idea of the contents of a play or movie getting confused with reality and the two intermingling is nothing new. I’ve seen it done enough times now that it could maybe even be considered its own sub-genre. I’m a large fan of this concept, with some films like INLAND EMPIRE being some of the more elegant ways to tell a story of this nature. In spite of this not being new territory, Miike makes it exciting by doubling down on the idea so thoroughly, really exploiting this concept of binaries melting into a single entity.

What’s also quite telling is that the film essentially begins by showing you the climax of the stage play. Miike intentionally wants you to see all of these people as their characters first, before seeing them as their real selves. As this strategy continues you slowly realize that you’re going to be seeing more of Yotsuya Kaidan than what’s going on outside of the play. We’re even made to identify with these characters instead of the real people behind them. Yet, we know that they are characters because of the brief intro that we see of them beforehand. You even learn the names of the characters in the play before finding out the actors’ names. We also, without a doubt, care more about the characters in Yotsuya Kaidan than the people that are portraying them. It’s sufficiently grueling to watch Iemon sabotage his family as they continue to faithfully praise him. It’s such a stark transformation as Iemon turns his back on the past as he embraces this new life for himself. The speed at which he sells his soul is almost as devastating as what he actually does to Oiwa.

Miike hammers in the themes of fantasy versus reality and the implicit duplicitousness that is necessary in such a comparison. Questions are constantly raised regarding the authenticity of people’s happiness and what it even means in the first place. “Starting a family, is that happiness?” is echoed to Miyuki at one point. And even when she tries to assert the happiness of someone else by saying, “You look happy,” the response she’s met with is, “don’t be deceived.” Deception is very integral to this story as it meshes the idea with the trade of acting. These characters are so invested in their production that they obfuscate the truth in the process, forgetting what is real. “Yin and yang, all things have a light and shady side,” is also told to Miyuki during the film in yet another reflection of this duality in play.

It’s this same idea that can essentially reflect Yotsuya Kaidan as a story about pimping that’s merely masquerading as a classical love tale. Literally everything in this film is a binary (unsurprisingly mirrors are a big motif in the film as well), and if you can appreciate the subtle thoroughness of such a thing (like what Ayoade achieves in The Double, for instance), you’re going to be in love with all of this. By the end everything lines up and connects between these two “realities” in a very impressive way that makes this mind trudge all the more satisfying.

Even the aesthetics of Over Your Dead Body contribute to the overwhelming feeling of fantasy and reality blending together. The film cuts between the stage play and real life with no context or delineation—almost smash cutting from one scene to the next. Overhead shots continually pepper the film, too, as if we’re part of the crew looking down on the set from the catwalk. These shots continue even outside of the rehearsal scenes though, again melding what is fiction and what is reality. Elsewhere scenes of rehearsal see bookending with scenes of Miyuki sleeping, making the issue of what is real further murky. Even the music adds to this overall atmosphere, with the foreboding, ritualistic score that plays throughout the rehearsal scenes sounding like a march sending these people to war. Their doom is unavoidable. On top of all of this the lighting also accentuates this bifurcation. Lighting effects are constantly in use, fade outs into blackness are plentiful, and colorful gels continually paint the theater in new lights. All of these techniques reflect precise theater lighting aesthetic, but also perfectly fit into various dream states. The lighting makes you feel like you’re shifting in and out of consciousness, moving between realities and selves, and it serves a smart dual purpose.

Over Your Dead Body’s biggest feat is that it’s impressively almost entirely filmed on a legitimate kabuki stage. A lot of the film’s style (especially the aforementioned lighting effects) are taken from this genre of theater, but as you might suspect, this stylistic touch is mostly going to fall numb on audiences members. If you can detect what’s going on, and the meticulous effort involved in doing so, this project shines even brighter. Otherwise, you’re still likely going to enjoy this film, but you might be left wondering what all the fuss was about.

More than anything else Over Your Dead Body left me with the urge of wanting to see Takashi Miike direct more theater! That’s basically what this is for the bulk of its runtime. I couldn’t help but have flashes of David Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No. 1, where he directs an overly ambitious stage show. Where Over Your Dead Body might let people down as a film, it’s completely incredible as an ambitious piece of kabuki theater. The fact that you continually forget that you’re seeing all of this take place within the restrictions of a kabuki stage—and with the heads of crew members in the audience, no less—is a testament to how the powerful material can elevate above the form. I couldn’t help but feel that somehow seeing Miike execute a version of this as actual theater would perhaps have even more poignancy accordingly.

Of course it’s worth digging into (no spoilers!) the sort of horror that lurks within Over Your Dead Body, which is certainly important in addition to all of the stylistic flair that’s propping it up. I think what you might take away the most from this is the sound effect of squishy footsteps on a soaked carpet in a scene with Miyuki that Miike gets a goldmine out of. He pulls a lot from a little here and the touches that he does include end up speaking volumes. While this material is far from the most brutal stuff I’ve ever seen, between the sound and visual combo here and the truly awful boil material that happens later, the film actually had me feeling ill. I wasn’t scared, but my body was reacting in a way that it hasn’t in a long time to a piece of horror.

What holds me back from ultimately loving Over Your Dead Body from as much as I was hoping I would, was that I’m still legitimately unsure of what happened at the end of the film. There are endless dips in and out of reality, with the film intentionally trying to keep you muddled. Even with how closely I was reviewing things, and going over the ending several times, I’m still ultimately unclear of how all of this was supposed to work out. With the amount of supernatural presences that are coursing through the film’s atmosphere, and the delight that it takes from pulling the rug out from under you, that might be the point of all of this. Perhaps you’re meant to be as lost as those within the film, simply going through another cycle as these ancient spirits continually play with us all. That’s far from a perfect ending, but it’s an explanation that I can at least understand rather than one that’s simply trying to be shocking.

Give this one a shot, go in with an open mind (and an empty stomach), and get taken away by Miike’s eerie, passionate film.

And good luck taking any medicine that you’re prescribed in the near foreseeable ever.