The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Directed by: Jim Jarmusch | 100 minutes | comedy, fantasy | Actors: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Maya Delmont, Taliyah Whitaker, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Kevin McCormick, Sid O’Connell, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Larry Fessenden, Rosie Perez, Jodie Markell, Carol Kane, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, Austin Butler, Luka Sabbat, Sturgill Simpson, Charlotte Kemp Muhl

Much in ‘The Dead Don’t Die’, a real zombie film by arthouse dinosaur Jim Jarmusch, kills. And that’s the point. We call that Deadpan humor, but is it enough? Without a good plot, an undead movie cannot come to life. Not even with a top cast of house actors Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Tilda Swinton. Driver is so deadpan in itself that dry humor can lead to cardiac arrest. A first minus.

Fellow officer Murray (the two patrolling the fictional town of Centerville) can be woken up at night for a hypothermic performance, even every night. Visually, this film is certainly skillfully made, with two highlights. The impressively scary zombie performance of Iggy Pop and a strong role of Swinton, the local funeral director who, like a kind of Kill Bill samurai, attacks the undead.

No cliché about American rural life is left untouched by Jarmusch. In that respect ‘The Dead Don’t Die’ seems stale. The director seems to be copying the local color of Fargo and Twin Peaks, with agents named Mindy and waitresses always cheerful to ever-complaining customers. This is at the same time a typical Jarmusch, with authentic vignettes of the loser life, a kind of cover album of their own Greatest Hits. You keep looking, because behind every corner in Centerville can be a Buscemi type.

We’ve seen it before, though, and Jarmusch’s storytelling style doesn’t really match the already unimaginative zombie plot anyway, with the low point being a dialogue between Murray and Driver at the end. Murray: “Why did you say everything was going to end badly?” Driver: ‘Because I read the entire script’. Murray: ‘Jim only gave me my own scenes. What a bag.’ The film was maligned at Cannes last spring for a reason. Only reboot for Iggy Pop eating a waitress. Already a B-movie classic.