The Dead Don’t Die is a zombie movie by Jim Jarmusch, and it’s exactly as strange, offbeat, and bewilderingly entertaining as that sounds. In a way it makes sense; the acclaimed indie director recently dived into the vampire genre with Only Lovers Left Alive, so a zombie movie very much in the vein of the original Night of the Living Dead but filtered through his unique lens, seems like a natural next step. It also gives him the opportunity to play around with a kind of gore he hasn’t depicted before and of course, as is the tradition of zombie movies, some relevant social commentary.
Set in a small midwestern town called Centerville during a strange global crisis which most of the townsfolk are ignorant about, the dead begin to come back to life and attack the living. The film follows the local placid police force, Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray), Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver), and Officer Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) attempting to deal with it, as others including a mysterious undertaker (Tilda Swinton), an irate farmer (Steve Buscemi), a horror movie junkie (Caleb Landry Jones), and an eccentric hermit (Tom Waits) respond to the zombies in their own ways.
That idiosyncratic Jarmusch sensibility is all over this movie. There’s a lot of deadpan humour, esoteric dialogue, conservative visual language, and the atmosphere of the small town is fittingly quaint and claustrophobic. It’s a world unto itself, populated very accurately by dreary people living in routines cut off to one degree or another from broader civilization. Against this environment, Jarmusch structures his movie into segmented threads following various characters through the chaos linked by recurring motifs; most notably a titular song by Sturgill Simpson and frequent reference to the “polar fracking” that has set the Earth off its orbit -accounting for inconsistently long days and nights, and to some, the current zombie situation. Few characters respond to the zombies the way people should, and while it’s played for laughs, particularly from Cliff and Ronnie’s dim almost casual approach to the crisis, there is a method to it.
The Dead Don’t Die isn’t the first movie to use its zombies as a metaphor for climate change, but it does so in a more direct and intelligent way than others by illustrating the different facets of how people deal with the issue. Each narrative subplot can be equated with a kind of climate response, from those who would ignore the zombies in the hopes they won’t be affected by them, to the guy who thinks he knows all about them and how to defend against them, to some kids entrapped in such a dire situation with them by the actions of adult authority figures. Even the cops’ apathetic response is telling; Ronnie’s repetitive declaration “this will all end badly” is the familiar observation of the resigned climate pessimist. The only person capable of fending the zombies off is Swinton’s bizarre newcomer to town, and the reason why is ultimately the movies’ best joke. Witnessing it all in half-articulate commentary is Waits’ Hermit Bob, a feral man dismissed by most of the town and the only person seemingly capable of evading the undead entirely.
He’s also the character who in spite of his insanity, fits in most with the movie’s acute self-awareness. The story has a tenuous and flexible reality, never identifying a specific geographical context for Centerville or the surrounding county, using simple and unimaginative names for places and people (Rosie Perez plays a reporter called ‘Posie Juarez’ for example), and plays into some very typical clichés of the zombie subgenre. In a handful of moments, Cliff and Ronnie even break the fourth wall seeming, to acknowledge their identities as actors in a movie with a relationship to the director, yet they’re ultimately powerless to the narrative and the whims of Jarmusch’s script. There’s something subtly existentially terrifying yet darkly comic in that, though I wish it had a greater or clearer purpose.
This is the first ensemble film Jarmusch has made since Broken Flowers in 2005, and most of its cast has worked with him before. However the style and symbolism is such that you don’t really care about any of them, with the possible exception of Sevigny’s Mindy. None are ever as engaging as the title character of Paterson or Nobody from Dead Man, and it can leave the film feeling somewhat hollow. That being said, Murray and Driver are great fits for the parts no doubt written for them, Swinton is splendidly outlandish, Buscemi’s a delightful asshole, Danny Glover’s a welcome presence, and though Selena Gomez and RZA are only there for their name recognition, the movie makes up for it with the inspired casting of a couple zombies as Carol Kane and Iggy Pop (who’s been a walking corpse now for years).
With its minimal expression and tangential, unfulfilling to the point of aimless subplots (one of which has noticeably no resolution whatsoever), this is not a zombie comedy for anyone looking for the next Shaun of the Dead. But Jarmusch has some things on his mind, and a clear respect for the zombie genre, which he can only convey in his particular absurdist way. Bleak and emotionless though it may be, The Dead Don’t Die is still fun and clever and interesting, at the very least as an experiment; one with some potency and a real distinct charm.
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