Over Your Dead Body

Based on a 200-year-old kabuki play, Miike Takashi presents a film that stands in stark contrast to trendy shock horror flicks that make audiences giggle and yelp as much as shriek in cinemas worldwide. Miyuki (Shibasaki Ko) and Kousuke (Ichikawa Ebizo) are lovers and stage actors preparing for their roles as Oiwa and Iemon, the female and male leads in Yotsuya Kaidan. Just like the fickle and bitter samurai Iemon, Kousuke is having affairs with younger women, and Miyuki finds it increasingly harder to separate Oiwa's tragedy from her own. The lines between fiction, fantasy and reality become blurry, before they are completely washed away in blood. And none shall laugh. htb

Suitable for audiences above 15 years of age.

Miike Takashi (b. 1960) grew up in a blue collar district in Osaka. Though he claims to have barely ever attended school, he managed to obtain a degree at Imamura Shohei’s film school. His works seem to owe a lot to Imamura and his fascination with the relation between the human lower body and the nether regions of society.

Among his many works, the unsettling horror Audition (1999) and the controversial Ichi the Killer (2001) are among the best known and is an unapologetic standard-bearer of the video genres anarchic traits. Miike has directed roughly 100 films within a plethora of genres since his 1991 debut. Always surprising his audience, he is as comfortable with making samurai dramas, slapstick yakuza, teenage date horrors, as well as mecha action films. Miike is a master of most genres, as he expertly toys and bends the rules as he sees fit. htb