Marry My Dead Body

Wu Ming-han, a homophobic policeman afraid of ghosts, picks up a red envelope from the ground while gathering evidence. By Taiwanese custom, whoever takes that envelope has agreed to marry the dead person who left it. The dead man is Mao Pang-yu, a young gay man whose death is unexplained. The officer is now both married and on the case. The film is not interested in ghost comedy. It is interested in a man forced to live in the same house as his own prejudice: it changes Ming-han through everyday detail rather than lecture. Mao's relationship with his family and his grandmother's stance make the most affecting section. The form is a genre mix: action, comedy, a narcotics investigation and open melodrama at the end. The tonal shifts are fast, and the film knows it. Cheng Wei-hao directed. It screened at the Golden Horse festival in November 2022, opened in Taiwan in February 2023 and, with $11.5 million, topped Mandarin-language films for the first half of the year. When it reached Netflix in August 2023 it entered the global top ten for non-English films in its first week. Taiwan submitted it as its Academy Award entry. Greg Hsu plays the policeman and Austin Lin the ghost. Who it is for: viewers who like genre-mixing Asian comedy and ghost stories. Who it is not for: anyone wanting consistency of tone. Moving from comedy to action and then to tears loses some viewers, and the homophobic jokes early on are uncomfortable.