bypeterfenton

Comedy is super subjective, and often rooted in culture and language-or so I have always thought. Marry My Dead Body was the first honest-to-God comedy movie I've watched in a foreign language and it's quickly become a favorite! A familiar plot is set up: homophobic cop gets connected with gay partner to investigate major case; homophobe's heart grows three sizes-but the big twist is the gay partner is dead and through a series of contrived coincidences, the homophobic cop has by accident entered a traditional ghost marriage to him. Hilarity ensues.

What I loved about this movie was the relationship that developed between the two central members of the ghost marriage, and I loved seeing the former homophobe starting to take ownership of his burgeoning friendship with his ghost husband and fight for him. It's a stark change laid out beautifully over the course of the film from beginning to end. Some of the police investigation part of the film wasn't quite it for me, but the humor all throughout and the touching character journey for Detective Ming-han made this an amazing viewing experience.

This movie was gorgeously shot, sad and brooding all throughout. The atmosphere was off the charts. The story didn't do anything too ambitious, the narrative was overall predictable and I could guess exactly where most scenes were going. Jonathan was a very well-drawn character, but I felt Carrie and Shane were a touch underdeveloped, even in a movie that was nearly two hours long that really just focused on three characters. I was a bit hazy on the timeline of the film, too, but I won't hold that against this movie too much since I am an American and have only a surface-level understanding of Mandarin.

I wish we could've gotten a bit more inside Shane's motivations and feelings, especially for the very sudden action he takes at the climax of the film and the ambiguous ending at the beach. It didn't sit great with me narratively, as I didn't feel a throughline was drawn. Overall, there's not much narratively this film does that hasn't been done better before or since-but I did enjoy the cinematography and production design quite a bit.

"Why are they doing this, the birds?" - the question on everyone's mind in this movie that nobody-I'd argue not even the director himself-seems to have an answer for. What was interesting about this movie was how stark of a plot switch happens once the horror takes off. I enjoyed the slice-of-life rom com the first half of the movie led us through (the opening scene at the bird shop was a brilliant introduction to our two leads, Mitch and Melanie), and the switch to inexplicable bird attack-based horror in the second half, despite all the bird imagery all throughout the film, is quite jarring. For all the successful visual suspense Hitchcock builds in the sequences leading up to attack sequences, such as the scene on the jungle gym, I was a bit underwhelmed watching the attack sequences. I don't think we needed more gore or anything like that per se, but I think a conventional movie score could've better heightened the stakes of the attacks and made this horror movie more... well, scary!

That all being said, it's clear Hitchcock is a great visual filmmaker, and the characters are well-drawn. This plot is unhinged, though, and while I'd be down for that in the hands of a great filmmaker like Hitchcock, I was a bit ambivalent on the bird attacks themselves. I think a score could've gone a long way.