At face value, The Dead Don’t Die is a quirky comedy with a zany self-awareness and zombies craving coffee. Just don’t expect to walk away from it entirely satisfied (or scared.)
Zombie movies have overtaken the Earth much like zombies are frequently portrayed as doing in said movies. Zombies have been featured in films that range from pure horror like Night of the Living Dead to teen romance like Warm Bodies. When writer/director Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die was announced, I figured it would be an unusual take on the genre. I was correct.
The film opens in Centerville, Pennsylvania, a rural town that very much resembles the locale presented in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Police Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) are responding to a call involving a stolen chicken. Farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi) has blamed the theft on Hermit Bob (Tom Waits,) who lives in the woods outside of town. As they drive away from delivering a warning to Hermit Bob, they notice that even though it’s after 8 PM, the sky hasn’t started to get dark yet. Ronnie’s watch has stopped and his cell phone is dead despite being fully charged.
At the local diner, the patrons — including Hank (Danny Glover) and Farmer Frank — listen to a radio news report that scientists believe that the Earth has been thrown off its axis by polar fracking. (Of course, the Department of Energy disputes these claims because polar fracking creates jobs for Americans.)
Soon, the dead begin to rise from their graves. Cliff and Ronnie, along with fellow officer, Mindy Morrison (Chloe Sevigny,) have to figure out how to deal with the problem. As the zombies stumble around the town feeding on the living, we hear them utter one-word mantras to what they found important when they were living. The zombies drawn to the local drugstore repeat “Oxy” or “Ambien” while undead children attacking the candy store profess their desire for “Snickers” and “toys.”
The Dead Don’t Die is more comedy than horror. Thanks to Jarmusch’s odd sense of humor, just about anything can and does happen. But along with the humor, there’s a sense of real world dread that permeates the film. Polar fracking is most certainly a thinly veiled reference to climate change. The reactions of the town populace, who notice that it’s pitch black at 5 in the afternoon and simply shrug it off as “weird”, mirror humanity’s overall apathy to the warning signs we’re seeing in the real world. Ronnie’s repeated use of the phrase, “This is all going to end badly,” is simultaneously a riff on Star Wars‘ “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” as well as a commentary on the state of our planet. But Jarmusch doesn’t dwell on this angle. If anything, I wished he’d have taken the opportunity to push the film more in this direction.
Murray, Driver, and Sevigny appropriately play off each other with the familiarity of people who work together day-in and day-out as their characters would. Tilda Swinton is excellent as Zelda, the weirdo Scottish funeral director who brandishes a samurai sword. The impressive cast are all uniformly excellent in their oddball and frequently deadpan roles, although most are simply extended cameos.
My biggest complaint about the movie is that the actors break the fourth wall a little too often. Instead of using the already chaotic situations as a source of comedic material, Jarmusch has the characters periodically acknowledge they’re in a movie. It’s a risky move that’s funny once but he goes to that well more than necessary.
At face value, The Dead Don’t Die is a quirky comedy with a zany self-awareness and zombies craving coffee. Just don’t expect to walk away from it entirely satisfied (or scared.)
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
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