Film Review: "The Dead Don't Die" (2019).

"The Road To Survival Could Be A Dead End" in The Dead Don't Die. This zombie horror comedy film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. In the sleepy small town of Centerville, something is not quite right. The moon hangs large and low in the sky, the hours of daylight are becoming unpredictable, and animals are beginning to exhibit unusual behaviors. News reports are scary, and scientists are concerned, but no one foresees the strangest and most dangerous repercussion that will soon start plaguing Centerville: the dead rise from their graves and feast on the living, and the citizens must battle to survive.

During production of their last effort Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Tilda Swinton gave Jarmusch the idea of doing a zombie movie. George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) served as an influence. By July 2018, Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, RZA, Swinton, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, Selena Gomez, and Tom Waits were cast in a zombie comedy with Jarmusch penning the script and to direct. At the same time, principal photography commenced, and took place in Fleischmanns, Elizaville, Margaretville, Ancram, and Catskill, New York.

The film features an ensemble cast the includes Murray, Driver, Sevigny, Buscemi, RZA, Swinton, Glover, Jones, Perez, Kane, Gomez, and Waits. In the time-honoured Jarmuschian fashion, the few things that happen in the film happen very slowly, but the dialogue is always gloomily amusing, and Murray and Driver's delivery of the gags is as cold and crisp as footsteps in fresh snow. Murray, Driver and cast play their characters not as blasé hipsters but, rather, deeply reflective, almost hopeless fools who seem to have decided that the zombie apocalypse is something they can handle.

Worth watching for Murray and Driver's performances alone, The Dead Don't Die finds writer-director Jim Jarmusch adding a typically offbeat entry to the zombie genre. The film cleverly balances scares and witty satire, making for a bloody good zombie movie with loads of wit. The film is side-splitting, head-smashing, gloriously gory horror comedy that will amuse casual viewers and delight genre fans. Instead of focusing on the Undead and trying to get the laughs there, it treats the living characters as sitcom regulars whose conflicts and arguments keep getting interrupted by annoying flesh-eaters. Though it is not the perennial downtown filmmaker's best work which it shares a sense of noise, heady, perilous passage. However, the real pleasure of the film is in its languid droll cool and its comedic portrayal of the zombie apocalypse, which is now our number one scenario in the inevitable event of us facing the zombie apocalypse. This is a film that finds horror not in the extreme, but in the mundane. That alone makes it a worthwhile entry in a genre that it both inhabits and rises above. The film is a droll, classy piece of cinematic dandyism that makes the Walking Dead cycle redundant in one exquisitely languid stroke.

Simon says The Dead Don't Die receives:

Also, see my review for Paterson.