The Dead Don’t Die

MPAA Rating: R | Rating: ★★★
Release year: 2019
Genre: Comedy, Horror, Satire Director: Jim Jarmusch

“The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

“What a f**ked up world.”

Two different characters say these statements at two very different times in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. The entire film resides in the tension of these two statements, between contemplation and cynicism, contentment and despair. A zombie horror comedy in the vein of Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland, Dead is an homage to B-movies and better times shot through with signature Jarmusch deadpan goofiness. Tom Waits plays a character named Hermit Bob, and Tilda Swinton portrays Zelda Winston, a Scottish mortician with a penchant for samurai swords. If those two character descriptions don’t interest you, Dead might have lost you already. But if you’re intrigued or delighted, the film has enough charm and chuckles to outweigh its overstuffed narrative.

“This isn’t gonna end well,” says youthful, stoic police officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) to his boss, Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray). The two have confronted the reclusive Hermit Bob about some stolen chickens from the “a**hole” Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi), prompting Bob to curse and shoot at them. Cliff is an aged lawman who seems a bit wearied by the drudgery of the job, yet still committed to the task—he’ll go tell Hermit Bob to stop stealing, but he isn’t going to put the guy in jail for shooting at the officers.

“This isn’t gonna end well,” ends up as a repeated joke throughout the film, building to the point of tedium before becoming funny all over again. Dead repeats all sorts of jokes in this way, particularly characters listening to Sturgill Simpson’s song written for the film, “The Dead Don’t Die.” Or there’s the continuous failing of technology, especially television screens, radios, and mobile phones. In the opening credits, an unexplained pixelated glitch suddenly appears during the “Focus Features” introduction, setting the tone for the rest of the film and the repeated glitches throughout—even when it’s familiar, this film will be off-center and out-of-place, as if we’ve seen this all before, yet not quite like this.

Indeed, the traditional zombie apocalypse has come to Centerville, USA—the town motto: “A Real Nice Place”—due to the results of polar fracking; the Earth’s axis has now become unstable, leading all sorts of unnatural consequences. With reanimated corpses coming out of the earth—“ghouls” as Ronnie calls ‘em—the small town is thrown into a panic as the dead…well…just won’t die. “Kill the head,” says Ronnie to Cliff, a line (and action) which is repeated again and again and again and again and…you get the picture.

Read the rest of my review at Fuller Studio.

IMDB Listing: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8695030/