All-star zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die is bonkers but uneven

Teeming with famous names and faces, this new movie opened the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

If you’re not familiar with the work of beloved indie director Jim Jarmusch, picture this.

In a 2010 episode of HBO comedy Bored to Death, the lead character Jonathan Ames (played by Jason Schwartzman) finds himself in a room, interviewing for a job with Jarmusch.

As Jonathan stands in the middle of this cavernous warehouse room, Jarmusch (who’s playing himself) circles him on a bicycle, around and around he goes, his voice and facial expression unchanging.

It’s a send-up of course, but it’s also a perfect distillation of Jarmusch.

The white-bouffanted Jarmusch has collected many favourite players over the years, stars he’s worked with previously on movies including Broken Flowers, The Limits of Control, Coffee and Cigarettes and more.

Many of those stars now feature in his latest movie, zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Chloe Sevigny and Danny Glover.

Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny and Bill Murray in The Dead Don't Die

For a comedy about flesh-eating ghouls, The Dead Don’t Die doesn’t have a lot of bite.

Perhaps Jarmusch’s signature drollness don’t translate as well to a zom-com as it did to his vampire movie, Only Lovers Left Alive.

Zombie movies are usually outlandish but in a brash way. The Dead Don’t Die is surprisingly quiet, even though it is, requisitely, bonkers.

If nothing else, the sight of Tilda Swinton gracefully and efficiently decapitating multiple zombies in one swoop with a samurai sword is reason enough to sit through the more uneven parts of this movie.

Filmed near Jarmusch’s home in upstate New York, The Dead Don’t Die is set in a small, rural town called Centerville.

It’s the kind of town with only one diner, one motel and three cops, Chief Cliff Robertson (Murray) and officers Ronnie (Driver) and Zelda (Sevigny).

The local farmer, a MAGA cap-wearing racist named Miller (Buscemi), Hermit Bob (Waits) and other residents are feeling agitated while all the animals and pets have mysteriously disappeared or are seen scarpering into the surrounding woods.

The mobiles and clocks stop working and Cliff keeps remarking about how it’s still daylight after 8pm. Through the radio and TV come reports that polar fracking in the arctic have led the Earth to change its rotation.

Preparing for the apocalypse

Then the dead (including Iggy Pop as a stringy-haired zombie) start waking up, lumbering out of their graves, searching for fleshy sustenance.

Ronnie is convinced it must be zombies and he’s the more fatalist one — “This whole thing is going to end badly” he keeps intoning — but Cliff isn’t buying it, yet.

It’s not long before Centerville is overrun by the hordes of the undead.

Jarmusch has said in interviews that the zombie idea came from seeing humans as this unthinking, all-consuming herd while the world burned down around us.

The polar fracking reference definitely positions The Dead Don’t Die as a stealth climate change parable while Jarmusch has said when he embarked on the project two years earlier, it was much frothier but it ended up darker than he expected because in the intervening time, the world got much darker.

The Dead Don’t Die could’ve used a bit more froth and silliness, relying too much on meta-humour. But this isn’t Shaun of the Dead, it’s a zombie movie made by Jim Jarmusch.

So its biggest problem is a mismatch of genre and director.

As it stands, it’s mildly amusing, mostly thanks to Swinton’s swanning and the dry-as-bone exchanges between Murray and Driver.

Rating: 3/5

The Dead Don’t Die is in cinemas from Thursday, September 26

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