Over Your Dead Body (Takashi Miike, 2014): Japan

Reviewed by Furkan Altunkaynak. Viewed at AFI Fest 2014.

A ghost story directed by Takashi Miike. Plot of the movie goes between a fictional story in a theater act and relatedly action taking in real life of the actors.

As known as Japanese scary movies not being fearful by Americans. As a Turkish person, with Japanese people we share many common beliefs and culture. For that reason, I expected to be scared a little more then a person who carries American culture. It turned out to be more interesting then scary.

Amazingly, the set design draws you into the movie. The theater they are acting in is not you see in your every day life. It’s round shaped stage, which happens to turn and brings another scene of the play to the audience. The theatrical act parts of the movie nicely designed to make you lost your mind into the beautiful elements of the theatrical act. The light games makes you feel like high and make you lose yourself watching one place to another. With little bit of special make-up is the shining glory of this film. It takes the movie whole new level and out of the white screen. I didn’t just watch the movie but feel the touch feeling at the edge of my fingertips. Editing between theater and real life confuse you between what is real and what it’s not. It’s obvious that was what they intended to feel by the audience. However this action could’ve done a little over made to gain more disturbing effect into the sequence, which could’ve been better. Computer graphics weren’t realistic enough in every scene and could’ve achieved better. Which can be seen from some other parts of the movie. Some of the scene has perfect looking graphics and some of them don’t which makes viewers distracted by it and lose attention. Color use to set up the line between real life and the life in the theater play was amazing. While drawing looking cartoonish picture on the theatrical parts, cold realistic looking colors are on the real life parts of the movie. Mixing up the idea as story goes forward deserves some standing up position claps and cheers. That really help to confuse the audience to lost track of which place they are in the movie like what is real and what is not.