The Dead Don't Die (Dir Jim Jarmusch, 1h 43m)

 

Jim Jarmusch is, it's fair to say, a director who enjoys subverting expectations, from his surprisingly accurately researched and respectful to Native Americans Western, Dead Man, to the samurai movie without samurai, by way of the mob movie, the aptly named Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Even where Jarmusch steps outside the self-restraint of genre, his films find some way to subvert, or at leas to question the language and iconography of mainstream cinema. The Dead Don't Die, in its tale of a zombie uprising threatening a small Middle-American town, against the backdrop of an impending, and quite likely, Apocalypse, is more of the same, a bleakly comic visitation from the living dead, as a well as a peon to b-movies, that, whilst a little uneven is, in typical Jarmuschian style, quite unique.

Introducing itself with a standoff between police officers Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray, in full late-era Murray deadpan mode), and Ronnie Robertson (a doom-certain Adam Driver who neatly plays foil to Murray, despite the younger man's bizarrely meta-textual knowledge) and local wood-dwelling hermit, Bob (a barely recognisable Tom Waits, who acts as both narrator and Greek chorus to the action onscreen), so the film quickly introduces the small-town American setting of Centreville, in a sequence cut to the titular country song, "The Dead Don't Die", which reappears several times in the film.

From this, we're introduced to the local characters, from casually racist, and deeply unpleasant farmer, Frank Miller (Jarmusch regular Steve Buscemi, complete with quasi-Trump hat), to gas station attendant and horror buff, Bobby (Caleb Landry Jones, inhabiting every awkward horror geek trope imaginable), not to mention juvenile delinquents and a trio of Ohioan hipsters. However, with strange occurrences, including mass animal disturbances and wildly out of skew day and night caused by polar fracking, though the companies concerned deny the link, so it's only a matter of time before, inevitably, the dead rise again.

The dead are, of course, the best thing about this film-although it is in Jarmusch's "everything and the sink" approach to what the dead actually represent, what they are, that makes it most enjoyable. At times they are the shambling masses of many a B-Movie-and it is without question that The Dead Don't Die is Jarmusch refracting and examining the B-Movie and the subculture around them. Elsewhere we get a sense of Romero's symbolic undead, of a zombie unlife in which the undead carry on their lives from before, often in search of the vices of their past lives, from coffee to wi-fi to all manner of the ephemera of past lives.

The difficulty of The Dead Don't Die is knowing how seriously to take its shambling undead, and their winnowing down of the populace of Centreville-undoubtedly, there is a deadpan sense to the entire proceedings, as one has come to expect from Jarmusch's more co medically inclined films, but is, in short, this apocalpyse to be taken seriously? Certainly, in its vein of getting together a decent handful of Hollywood's finest talent, only to kill them off (if, as in the case of Iggy Pop and a decent chunk of the cast they aren't dead already) cannot help but compare to the very obviously B-Movie riffings of Mars Attacks! One senses, however, that Jarmusch's approach is cleverer than that, more metatextual, more a tribute to the self-important, earnest nature of B-Movies trying to hold themselves and ludicrous plots up, unaware of their inevitably comic nature.

Nowhere is this seen better than in the film's central trio of Cliff, Ronnie, and, in what may be her strangest role in a career full of strange and chameleonic roles, Tilda Swinton as eccentric samurai-sword wielding undertaker, Zelda Winston. Murray and Driver's characters carry much of the film, their back and forth conversations as the reality of what is occurring kicks in remaining matter of fact, despite Drivers' constant assertions that "this isn't going to end well". Indeed, when compared to their increasingly hysterical colleague, Mindy (Chloë Sevigny), one could honestly frame The Dead Don't Die as a film focusing upon how different people view fate, particularly when Driver drops a bombshell on how exactly he's been so sure about his proclamations of oncoming doom.

Zelda, for her part, seems to belong to a totally different film, a far more obvious and far more openly comedic film about a samurai-sword wielding undertaker Japanophile heroine saving the town from zombie invasion, as she merrily whizzes through town behind the wheel of a Smartcar, disposing of the undead, and her narrative ends in what may well be one of Jarmusch's most enjoyably ridiculous moments, a complete jaw-dropper that leaves audience, and indeed Cliff and Ronnie speechless-it is almost endearingly ridiculous.

Endearing is, in short, what The Dead Don't Die is. There have been funnier, more politically pointed, and of course, gorier zombie movies, but what Jarmusch captures is, in short, why we like zombies-destructive creatures of habit with familiar-perhaps too familiar-faces, shambling through the afterlife as we shamble through life. Though it's perhaps heavy handed, too peppered with humour as deadpan as its ghoulish hordes, Jarmusch's tale of the end of one small American town is perhaps more evocative, more emblematic of the way he views the country going, than even he realises.

Rating: Highly Recommended.