THE DEAD DON’T DIE / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: JIM JARMUSCH / STARRING: BILL MURRAY, ADAM DRIVER, CHLOË SEVIGNY, TILDA SWINTON, STEVE BUSCEMI, IGGY POP / RELEASE DATE: JULY 12TH
Jim Jarmusch isn’t exactly the type of filmmaker you would imagine making a zombie movie, but even those who aren’t fans of his work should be curious to see what his stab at one might look like. Sadly, The Dead Don’t Die is exactly as you would imagine but lands like a paranormal clown fart at a posh dinner party. Despite vibrant concepts and colourful supporting characters, TDDD is only ascetically inventive. An A-list cast and forgotten character actors are dragged back on screen in undead garb and dispassionately directed through a slack narrative with hack panache in a meta zombie satire that’s gratingly self-satisfying.
Bill Murray plays Cliff Robertson: Chief of Police in the small mid-American town Centerville, alongside Deputy Ronnie Peterson (Driver): a pessimistic cop with a shotgun and catchphrase (“this isn’t gonna end well”). The two investigate shots fired by local vagrant Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) before odd anomalies lead to a zombie outbreak. Cliff, Ronnie, and cop colleague Mindy (Sevigny) try to figure out what to do about it.
The ‘story’ flows like a stream of consciousness (or frequency activated rectal tremor) gliding through the lives of twisted, kooky locals before reverting to the cops’ without sticking to a story path. The lack of direction reflects the aloofness of TDDD’s leads who saunter through the ghoul epidemic as unfazed as the legion of cinephiles will be in response to yet another undead adventure.
Over the past couple of decades, zombies have become so engrained in film and pop culture, the notion of fictional film characters having no prior knowledge of the undead seems more implausible than them rising from the grave in the first place. Cognisance is clearly part of Jarmusch’s m.o. but it fails to fortify or even justify TDDD. Jarmusch’s style make the film aesthetically and theoretically pleasing but doesn’t buttress the crux, plot, and plastically acted characters.
Jarmusch dots a quaint town of hardware stores and diners with juke boxes, coffee, cake, and racism, alongside the kind of quirky faces you come across between places. Tilda Swinton steals the show as a Scottish, Samurai sword-swinging funeral director-cum-mortician who makes thrashing zombies look as easy as hanging washing out. Aside from her and Hermit Bob, most of the others are perfunctorily performed, as though voiced and manoeuvred by kids, as action figures.
Some ‘hipsters from the big city’ pop up in a subplot, like the type who would typically lead a ‘80s slasher before being felled like pastrami. Meanwhile, kids in a nearby juvenile detention centre predict ‘total planetary destruction’. Danny Glover and Steve Buscemi play craggy locals. Carol Kane cameos as ‘the late Mallory O’ Brien’, a liquor loving local who returns seeking Chardonnay while a zombie Iggy Pop waddles in like a tranquilised penguin or a half-naked witch of the west.
A geeky fan bridges our world into the film through pop culture references, reinforcing the irony and meta fabric at TDDD’s centre. This character also contributes to a kooky Scooby Doo air that works wonders in a zombie context, with further nods to Psycho, Romero’s original Dead trilogy and by using terms like ghouls.
Unique narrative hooks include: continuous daylight caused by polar fracking, toxic lava vibrations linked to the earth rotation on axis as innovative outbreak sources, resulting in pets running away or turning on their owners. Hermit Bob also finds some out of season orange mushrooms growing in the forest, which could be to do with why the moon has turned purple. But, despite these quaint traits, TDDD remains crippled by core factors along with its own self-consciousness. JJ elatedly,
gratingly, and repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, referring to the song playing in the cop car (The Dead Don’t Die by Sturgill Simpson) as being the theme as it drifts from their radio into non-diegetic air while Cliff and Ronnie address the script directly by ask questions like “are we improvising here?”
The film flat lines in its final act while slithering towards a risible finale during which Jarmusch attempts to update and restate a message about consumerism that hasn’t changed much in forty years, since Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. If the point of JJ’s reiteration is to say nothing much has changed; we are all still locked in a cultural regurgitation and creativity drought as pop continues to eat itself, given this is all glaringly obvious, maybe he should have just let the undead rest.
Expected Rating: 8 out of 10
