General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Marry My Dead Body

Marry My Dead Body (關於我和鬼變成家人的那件事, literally "About the Matter of My Ghost Becoming Family") is a 2023 Taiwanese supernatural action comedy directed by Cheng Wei-hao (程偉豪), in which a homophobic police officer is forced into a ghost marriage with a dead gay man after picking up a red wedding envelope, and the two must solve a criminal case together.¹ Starring Greg Hsu (許光漢), Austin Lin (林柏宏), and Gingle Wang (王淨), it became the highest-grossing Taiwanese film of 2023 and Taiwan's submission for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	關於我和鬼變成家人的那件事 (Mandarin)¹
Director / writers	Directed by Cheng Wei-hao; screenplay by Cheng Wei-hao and Sharon Wu (吳瑾蓉)⁴
Cast	Greg Hsu as Wu Ming-han, Austin Lin as Mao Pang-yu (Mao Mao), Gingle Wang as Lin Tzu-ching¹^•⁵
Release	Closing film of the 2022 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival; Taiwanese theatrical release 10 February 2023; global Netflix premiere 10 August 2023⁶^•⁷
Box office	NTD 363,843,645 from 1,474,856 admissions in Taiwan; the highest-grossing Taiwanese film of 2023⁷^•⁸
Major awards	Golden Horse Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; Best Screenplay at the 25th Taipei Film Awards; Best Asian Film at Neuchâtel 2023⁴^•¹
International recognition	Taiwan's submission for Best International Feature Film, 96th Academy Awards³

Spoilers

Plot and premise

Wu Ming-han, a straight, homophobic, and ghost-phobic policeman, accidentally picks up a red envelope from the ground while collecting evidence at a scene. Under the Chinese folk custom of ghost marriage (冥婚), anyone who picks up such an envelope is expected to marry the deceased, or suffer misfortune; the envelope turns out to be intended for a man, Mao Pang-yu, a young gay man who died under mysterious circumstances.¹^•³^•⁵

After the unwanted wedding, Ming-han finds he can see his "ghost husband," and the two are drawn into the long-running undercover drug case Ming-han is working, endangering the efforts of his colleague Lin Tzu-ching. To resolve both the case and Mao's death, the terrified officer must cooperate with the ghost he was forced to marry.¹^•⁹ The film runs 130 minutes and blends action, comedy, fantasy, and crime-thriller elements.¹

Ghost marriage and cultural context

The story is built on the Taiwanese and Chinese folk practice of ghost marriage, in which a deceased person is married to a living person or another deceased person. In the version the film uses, a red envelope left on the ground by a family binds whoever picks it up to marry the dead relative; refusing brings misfortune.³ Director Cheng Wei-hao has said he grew up in Taiwan surrounded by folklore and local beliefs, noting that there is a temple roughly every kilometer on average in Taiwan, and that he accumulated stories about gods, ghosts, and folklore from childhood; local folklore is the material he draws on for genre films.³

The film was produced after Taiwan legalized same-sex marriage in 2019, the first jurisdiction in Asia to do so, and Cheng has described the film as representing "Taiwan's contemporary significance" on that issue.¹⁰ Critics have read it as a mainstream comedy that uses its odd-couple pairing to address lingering prejudice toward Taiwan's LGBTQ community despite the 2019 legalization.¹¹ Academic work has examined the film's body narratives through Foucault's theory of discourse and power, arguing that its contrasting depictions of human, ghostly, and gendered bodies dissolve conventional fears of ghosts and death while engaging the issue of same-sex marriage.¹² A study in Cultural Studies reads the film as interrogating the intersection of conventional familial virtues and liberal discourses in contemporary Taiwan's sexual public culture.¹³ A Kyoto University symposium report on trans-media queer representation describes it as the highest-grossing LGBT film in Taiwanese cinema history.¹⁴

Production and development

The project originated in a short-story competition run by Cheng's company with another firm; the grand-prize entry was about a street cleaner who picked up a red envelope and became entangled in a ghost marriage.¹⁵ Cheng, who wanted to make a comedy, brought in a co-writer and changed the protagonist from a street cleaner to a detective so that criminal cases could enter the story, and enlarged the supernatural elements because the second lead is a ghost.³ He described his method for handling the many genres by splitting each story into a foreground and a background layer: audiences describe a film by its foreground story, such as "a suspenseful crime" or "a supernatural thriller," while other elements sit behind it.³ The car-chase sequence used virtual production and full CG.³

Cheng was already known for the commercially successful Tag-Along urban-legend horror films, and Marry My Dead Body was his fifth feature, continuing his practice of combining horror, crime, mystery, and science-fiction elements within one project.⁹^•¹⁰

Release and box office

The film closed the 2022 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, described by Netflix as the largest and longest-running film festival in Taiwan, before its Taiwanese theatrical release on 10 February 2023.⁶^•⁷ It earned NTD 363,843,645 from 1,474,856 admissions in Taiwan, making it 2023's highest-grossing Taiwanese film; Netflix reported USD 11.5 million (NTD 360 million) and the top spot among Mandarin films in the first half of the year.⁷^•²^•⁸ It premiered globally on Netflix on 10 August 2023, timed to Ghost Month, and remains available on the service.²^•¹⁶ Hong Kong was Taiwan's largest overseas theatrical market for the film's year, and South Korean coverage noted celebrity influence in boosting its reach.⁸

Reception and awards

At the 60th Golden Horse Awards in 2023 the film won Best Adapted Screenplay for Sharon Wu and Cheng Wei-hao, and received nominations for Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, and Best Leading Actor for both Greg Han Hsu and Po-Hung Lin, among others.⁴ It won Best Screenplay at the 25th Taipei Film Awards, with nominations for Best Actor and Best Visual Effects, and took the Best Asian Film prize at the 2023 Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival; it also screened at the 2023 Hong Kong International Film Festival and Udine Far East Film Festival.²^•¹ It won the Audience Award in the Asian Competition at the New York Asian Film Festival.¹¹ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 70% Tomatometer from 10 critics and a 91% audience score.⁵

Reviewers have been divided on its portrayal of gay men. Common Sense Media's review criticizes stereotypical representations that repeat old associations between gay men and depression, illness, and death, while other critics describe a "hilariously heartwarming" treatment of a long-standing tradition.¹⁷^•⁵ The Taipei Times noted that beyond comedy the film touches on issues from same-sex marriage to environmental awareness.¹⁸

Adaptations and related works

A prequel webtoon, Marry My Dead Body: When I Was Alive, by the comic artist July, was published by MOJOIN (Gamania Group) on 25 April 2023 in six episodes. It examines Mao Pang-yu's life before his death, his first attempts at flirting with other boys, and his relationship with his grandmother, and was nominated for Comic of the Year at the 15th Golden Comic Awards.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026