The Dead Don't Die (2019)

Jim Jarmusch has never been a director particularly interested in meeting his audience halfway. Since the early 1980s, the American independent filmmaker has built a reputation for slow, deadpan pictures that prize atmosphere and character over conventional plotting: Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, Broken Flowers, a filmography that tends to split opinion right down the middle. The Dead Don't Die, released in 2019, represents his first proper foray into horror, or at least horror-adjacent territory. The premise is simple enough: the small, unremarkable American town of Centerville finds its routines interrupted when the dead begin to rise. What Jarmusch does with that premise is, depending on your patience for a certain kind of arch, self-aware filmmaking, either a wry commentary on consumerism and genre convention, or a very long, very slow shrug.

The film was produced through a partnership of smaller outfits, Kill the Head, Animal Kingdom, and Longride, and arrived in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which tells you something about the kind of film it is positioning itself as. Jarmusch assembled what the film's own tagline cheekily called "the greatest zombie cast ever disassembled", and on paper it is difficult to argue. Bill Murray (whose other work you can find discussed in our review of The Jungle Book (2016)) and Adam Driver play the two central police officers tasked with making sense of the chaos, a pairing that sounds, on paper, like comic gold. Chloë Sevigny takes the third officer role. Tilda Swinton, playing a sword-wielding Scottish mortician, brings her customary otherworldly quality to what is essentially an extended cameo. Caleb Landry Jones rounds out the principal ensemble as the local hardware and media shop owner. These are not unknowns being asked to carry an indie oddity; these are seasoned performers, several of them with long histories in prestige and arthouse cinema alike.

The horror-comedy blend is a notoriously difficult one to pull off with any consistency. Films that manage it tend to be discussed for years, while those that miss the mark can feel particularly frustrating precisely because the ingredients were so promising. For a sense of how the genre can work when it clicks, it is worth reading the site's take on Tiger Stripes (2023), another horror film reviewed here that takes an unconventional approach to its genre conventions. Jarmusch is clearly interested in using the zombie framework as a vehicle for something more pointed, leaning heavily on deliberate self-referentiality and meta-humour throughout the film's 104-minute runtime. Whether that gamble pays off is very much the question at the heart of the film.

I'd rather sandpaper my gonads than watch this trash again. My bald friend recommended it to me and so now I will never trust another recommendation from him. Probably the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. I LOVE zombie films typically. Some of my favourite films of all time are the Romero classics, 28 days series (not zombies, I know), Shaun of the Dead etc... and so going into this with a really strong cast, I had hopes. This movie from the outset was poorly acted (they look like they didn't even want to be there), poorly paced, and overall didn't really have any sort of idea of what sort of movie it actually wanted to be. Overall, it was just BORING. They kept breaking the 4th wall, just to make 'in-jokes' between the director and the cast, which was about as fun as plucking my Grandad's arse hair. By the end... when a fucking UFO turns up for absolutely zero reason, I was just begging for it to end. I've seen some shit in my time but this is probably going to hold it's place as the worst movie of all time by a long-shot.

And honestly, I think that frustration is completely earned. There is something particularly deflating about a film that squanders a cast this strong, and I say that as someone who will always show up for Murray or Swinton in almost anything. When the laughs do not land and the horror does not unsettle, you are left with a film that is essentially trading on its own cleverness, and finding that account considerably overdrawn. For anyone else who wandered in expecting something with a bit more meat on its bones, maybe take a look at Castle Freak (2020) as a reminder that horror films with a low-budget independent spirit can actually commit to being frightening. Sometimes the most generous thing you can say about a film is that at least it was short. This one, at 104 minutes, did not even have the decency for that.

Rating: ½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-02-12

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Trailer

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