The world is veering off its axis. The moon has the blue shimmer of a stove-top burner. Clocks have stopped working. And in the sleepily generic slice of rural life known as Centerville, where everyone has names like Cliff and Bobby and Hank and Mindy and drinks coffee at the roadside diner, people are getting eaten. No matter. The police are onto it. Ronald Peterson (Adam Driver) knows what’s up. It’s zombies, plain and simple. But he doesn’t inspire confidence, mumbling only that this is “going to end badly”.
There was a time in my life I thought meta jokes in film were just inherently clever, but perhaps I’ve seen the light, just like when you begin to find novels about authors writing novels just numbingly tedious. But there is a hierarchy – for as much as many have got it wrong, some have got it very right. For the horror fans in recent memory this continuum of genre-trolling works may stretch from the later entries in the Scary Movie stable at one end to Shaun of the Dead and Cabin in the Woods at the other. It’s an unforgiving scale. But if there was someone to bet on striking a pleasing balance of mockery and fulfilment, you’d have your money on Jim Jarmusch to do better than most.
Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive was not just a vampire film, so it figures that The Dead Don’t Die isn’t just a zombie film. He’s throwing shade at the government for misinformation about the climate emergency and at a small-minded ignorance of the consequences. This also has a slight tinge of ‘The children are our future but we’re letting them down’… I think. So far so good. But at a certain point, unless you’ve come up with a novel way of circumventing clichés (something this film is at pains not to do), it really must come down to one thing: lopping zombies. Yawn. Jarmusch is known to be laconic, but in the context of this complacent snore of a film, it’s hard to care what he’s trying to say.
The film boasts a gentry of alternative cinema in Driver, Bill Murray, Chloe Sevigny and Steve Buscemi, with Selena Gomez a novel inclusion as one of a few youthful blow-ins from outta town. Together they all seem to be having a lot of fun playing the pawns in a larger narrative piss-take. And there are some laughs to be gained, from both their deadpan delivery and the film’s sarcastic nature. But mostly Jarmusch’s ironic mockery just comes across as smug. If you’re going to send up a genre, have a go. Don’t just pussyfoot around the shallows, only venturing into the mainstream to laugh derisively at it.
And he clearly is capable of better. When Gomez’s character charms local comic book nerd cum gas station attendant Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones) – ‘I admire your film knowledge’ – it hits the mark, but given the lengths taken to send up the genre, including introducing Tilda Swinton as a sword-wielding Scottish pathologist (enjoyable enough), you might also wonder if Jarmusch wants audiences to say that of himself. We might have done if he’d injected some life into proceedings (no pun intended), but after a while even the likes of Murray and Driver seem to tire of the film’s fairly thin conceit. This isn’t a particular surprise in Murray’s case, his career seemingly steered by cult reputation and marketing more than any noticeable enthusiasm in his acting these days.
Their chemistry loses its humour, recurring jokes around a local country singer fall flat, a whole subplot at the juvenile detention centre serves no purpose either comedic or dramatic, and Chloe Sevigny is done a disservice in being reduced to whimpering and wailing for large stretches. Perhaps star power has been used here to mask a dearth of wit, but when you’re looking for comedic pay-off by casting Iggy Pop as a member of the undead, then you’re probably fighting a losing battle to begin with. On the other hand, given the environmental tilt to this film, Jarmusch at least does a good job of recycling jokes even past their use-by date, so kudos for that.
The Dead Don’t Die is in cinemas from 26th September through Universal Pictures.
