The Dead Don't Die

Fourth Wall Of The Dead

The Dead Don't Die
USA/Sweden 2019 Directed by Jim Jarmusch
UK cinema release print

Warning: Some very slight spoilerage.

I’ve always liked Jim Jarmusch as a writer/director, since first seeing his early masterpiece Down By Law in the late 1980s. I’ve not seen all of his movies... there are a few gaps... but I have seen and enjoyed most of them. Every now and again he will make a movie that seems to be a complete side step from his usual fayre. The first time I noticed this was in his truly excellent Ghost Dog - The Way Of The Samurai but he also took me by surprise by making a ‘vampire movie’ a few years back called Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed by me here). Both of those films were much more commercially minded, it seems to me (either by design or by fluke) but each still transcended their genre trappings and held the key elements that I tend to associate with Jarmusch’s work over the years...

Those being: They were funny, poignant and highlighted the alienation of people sharing different languages and cultures even as they drew together.

So when it was announced that Jarmusch had made a zombie movie, I was interested... not just because I happen to like that sub-genre of horror movie anyway but because I knew, coming from Jarmusch, that it would be like no other zombie movie that ever came before it. Well... I got that right.

The film stars Bill Murray and Adam Driver, both regular collaborators with the director (check out Driver’s role in the directors last non-documentary movie Paterson, which I reviewed here) as two cops who are the main police presence in their small town of Centerville, along with the only other cop in town played by Chloë Sevigny. And they are all supported by a star studded cast, many of whom have worked with the director before, including Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, RZA, Selena Gomez, Iggy Pop and Caleb Landry Jones (in a wonderful turn as a petrol and film/comic book merchandise dealer who wears a Nosferatu t-shirt). And, as you would expect from a cast like this (or pretty much any cast under this director, actually), they are all pretty amazing. Between them, Murray and Driver keep the mood sombre with their perpetually downbeat expressions and this helps maintain the minimalistic, gloomy atmosphere of a town, one of many, which has suddenly been overrun with a plague of zombies.

Now, I think this film is going to really divide people and there’s an element that even I, while laughing out loud at a lot of the wonderful humour on display here, found somewhat annoying. I’ll get to just what that is in a minute but let me first look at what this film both shares and, often, doesn’t share with the zombie genre in general.

Well, the common traits are a marked goriness when the humans are attacked although, conversely, when older zombies are out walking there is just dust instead of blood, which is possibly more accurate (I’m not sure, not being an expert on the undead myself). There’s also... and this is quite blatant here and almost being done just to check off boxes, it seems... the comparison of zombies who, like their nearest on-screen antecedents in the George A. Romero zombie flicks, are a satire of various aspects of our culture. Indeed, Jarmusch almost goes over the top to prove a point here by comparing some of the zombies to mobile phone/social media users and demonstrating this while it’s already been established earlier on in the text of the film what the ‘wifi’ so desired by the walking dead has already failed in the town.

However, it does do a lot which the modern, post-Romero zombie movie doesn’t often do. For example, it gives us a pseudo-scientific reason for the outbreak of the undead (which somehow comes in two stages in its ressurectional properties and thus renders the narrative nonsensical anyway... possibly what Jarmusch wants here) whereas most modern zombie films don’t try to find a rationale behind the undead shenanigans, they just deliberately side step it and cut to the chase. Here, Jarmusch has introduced the concept of polar fracking throwing the earth off its axis and this somehow raising the dead. Honestly, though... I think this is just another excuse to heavy hand the various metaphors used within the genre and, in some ways poke fun of it.

And that’s where I have my main problem with this film... the lack of respect for the genre. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a director like Jarmusch seeming to say that films made in these kinds of genres are dumb and I’m more than happy for him to have a pop at them. However, the way in which he does it, with a blatant disregard for his own story mechanics where its later shown that... quite literally... anything goes (and if you’ve seen the movie I’m talking about both the final exit scene of Tilda Swinton’s character and the awareness of its non-feasibility in the script by Adam Driver’s character). And this is a big problem for me because, as I’ll get to in a minute, this kinda feels like the director is insulting the intelligence of the kinds of people who would turn out for a film like this... or at least that’s the way it felt to me, anyway.

Also, there’s a lot of referential, postmodernistic jokes in the main body of the film and while the director has done this just a little in the past, usually with a lot more of a story impact than the ‘thrown off’, almost Tarantino-esque way he does it here, I think this dumbs down the movie somewhat too. Again, don’t get me wrong because I had a little chuckle when I saw the late, great director Sam Fuller’s name on a tombstone but this film seems to be loaded with this sort of stuff and, outside of the obvious and loving references to Pittsburgh (where Romero plied his zombie trade), there seemed to be to be way too much of this kind of thing and it felt like the high calibre director was kind of slumming it, to some extent. Jarmusch is better than this, is what I kept thinking... it just seemed a little out of character for him.

Okay, so there were a few walk outs in the audience when I saw this (I’m pleased to say because, if someone like Jarmusch doesn’t get some walk outs then he’s almost failed) and I think this may be due to the quite blatant self awareness of some of the characters, Adam Driver’s in particular... and their inability or disinterest in helping themselves out in terms of where the script is taking them. So, yes, Adam Driver and Bill Murray’s characters both show, from very early in the film, that they are characters in a film and this kinda grates in the way it’s done. We’re not being asked to share in any peril or the particularly humourous modes of speech that the various characters explore (including cycles of repeat phrases which got me smiling quite a lot, it has to be said) because we can’t invest with them in any way as characters. In fact, we are being asked to interact with them on a more metatextual level, it seems but... only when it doesn’t get in the way of the on-screen action... which is a bit like the director is trying to ‘eat all the pies’ and not helpful in creating a film which holds together tonally, despite the minimalistic air of cynicism and acceptance that Jarmusch pulls from the air almost effortlessly.

Despite all these criticisms though, I personally really enjoyed The Dead Don't Die. It’s not ever going to make the top of my list in terms of favourite Jarmusch movies but it’s an entertaining piece and I think long time fans of the director shouldn’t have as much of a problem with it as a more commercially minded audience expecting to see a ‘cool zombie movie’ might have. Recommended to cineastes who are not worried about seeing what I think is personally too many directorial experiments thrown together into the same film. It’s interesting, funny and entertaining so, honestly, what more could you want from a night out at your local cinema?