The Dead Don’t Die, the new film from veteran auteur Jim Jarmusch, has been marketed in some circles as a zombie comedy. This description, which could also apply to modern cult hits like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, might lead you to believe that the movie is both funny and entertaining. It is neither. In fact, it isn’t really much of anything, beyond maybe a perverse practical joke or perhaps a diabolical social experiment. It’s almost like Jarmusch is trolling his viewers, tantalizing us with the possibility of a top-flight cast, then subjecting us to a parade of bafflingly inert scenes. This isn’t a movie. This is Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby.
If Jarmusch is laughing, he’s the only one. Forced to put a label on the putative comedy of The Dead Don’t Die, I suppose I’d call it meta deadpan, which is already giving it far more credit than it deserves. Actors tend to recite the same lines of dialogue over and over, typically in flat, bored tones. There are lots of references and in-jokes, which try and fail to perform the function of actual jokes. Sometimes people swear; sometimes they yell. Mostly, they exchange mundane observations with a stiffness that masquerades as arch cleverness. Surely the extreme detachment is some sort of feint, right? Guess again. Deadpan humor has rarely felt so lifeless.
The film’s only genuine artistic flourish doubles as its most obnoxious tic: Several of the characters—all residents of a one-horse town called Centerville (shooting took place in a tiny village 150 miles north of New York City)—seem to know that they’re in a movie. Many of them are acquainted with a ditty called “The Dead Don’t Die”, a Sturgill Simpson ballad that someone describes as “the theme song”. Uh huh. In the middle of one conversation, an actor asks, “Are we improvising now?” a bizarre moment which murders a scene that was already on life support. Later, a character who continually states that things will end badly—another of those lines whose constant repetition purports to make it humorous—confesses that he’s confident in his prediction because he’s already read the script. His partner is annoyed. “Jim only gave me our scenes,” he grouses.
Is this supposed to be funny? Ironic? A winking recognition that our destinies are guided by an invisible hand? Jarmusch isn’t telling, and while some might declare his coyness the mark of a wily prankster, I suspect that he just doesn’t give a shit. There’s no payoff to any of these meta riffs, which vary from tedious to downright inane; for example, a newscaster portrayed by Rosie Perez is named—wait for it—Posie Juarez. Good one. (The one time I recall cracking a smile: A delivery man played by RZA drives a van labeled “WuPS”.)
Structurally, The Dead Don’t Die is indeed a zombie movie in multiple ways, lumbering through a familiar setup in which corpses rise from their graves and raise hell. That means we’re required to spend some time with Centerville’s inhabitants, most of whom are as archetypal as the hamlet they live in. There’s the steady old police chief (Bill Murray), who cruises around town with his trusty deputy (Adam Driver); they have a female colleague (Chloë Sevigny), whose gender is underlined by the way she often wails hysterically and vomits at the sight of blood. There is also a racist farmer (Steve Buscemi) who crosses paths with a black hardware store owner (Danny Glover), a theoretical conflict that is never explored. The guy who runs the gas station (Caleb Landry Jones) is also a horror-movie nerd; when a traveler (Selena Gomez) who’s passing through town tells him, “Your film knowledge is impressive,” your ribs are liable to get cracked by Jarmusch’s elbow.
That nerd describes the traveler’s Pontiac as “very George Romero”, a reference that does Jarmusch no favors. Aspiring to Dawn of the Dead (still, for this critic’s money, the best zombie movie ever made), The Dead Don’t Die vaguely fancies itself a commentary on American materialism; in case you weren’t sure, Tom Waits plays a heavily bearded hermit who partially narrates the film and explicitly discusses the perils of American materialism. But there is no bite to Jarmusch’s metaphor. We learn that the zombies are compelled to return to the passions they held during life (coffee, wine, free cable), an insight that’s far too common to be witty. Similarly, any political symbolism that Jarmusch intended to smuggle in—we hear snippets of radio broadcasts discussing polar fracking—is feeble and half-hearted.
The same is true of the film’s execution (or should I say, executions). Visually, The Dead Don’t Die is competent, which means it’s as dull as its characters and as blunt as its allegory. There are quite a few scenes of bloody death, which Jarmusch seems committed to making as unexciting as possible. Zombies shuffle forward, slowly overpower humans, and eat them—rinse and repeat. There are a few cool shots of the movie’s lone halfway-interesting character, a samurai sword-wielding mortician, beheading undead bodies with her blade, but most of the gore and bloodshed feel yanked out of a low-rent episode of The Walking Dead.
That mortician is played by Tilda Swinton, who starred in Only Lovers Left Alive, Jarmusch’s vision of modern vampires of the city as dilettantish intellectuals paralyzed by ennui. I didn’t much care for that film either, but it at least possessed some thematic purpose. Similarly, while I chafed against the slow pace of Jarmusch’s most recent movie, the Driver-led Paterson, I could appreciate its gentle humanity. The Dead Don’t Die has neither of those things; instead, it has Adam Driver, an actor who appears in Star Wars, briefly talking about Star Wars.
“You have to kill the head,” a character explains when instructing someone on how to decommission a zombie. It’s both appropriate advice and something of a diagnosis. With a movie this brain-dead, the only solution is a lobotomy.
Grade: D+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.