Review | Cannes 2019: The Dead Don’t Die film review – Jim Jarmusch has a blast with all-star zombie comedy
- The undead have never looked as cool as this. Jarmusch’s zombies zero in on things they were addicted to when alive: white wine, Snapple ... and Wi-fi
- Selena Gomez, Tilda Swinton, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, and Chloe Sevigny star in this cops vs corpses story that’s full of in-jokes and Jarmusch references
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4/5 stars
“This isn’t going to end well,” mutters Adam Driver’s small-town police officer in Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, the opening film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
You have to wonder if Driver’s character has spent time watching previous curtain-raisers at the world’s most prestigious film festival. Most of them are rather forgettable. But Jarmusch’s film, lightweight though it is, is a smartly tooled tribute to both the horror genre and the director’s own body of work.
Featuring a number of Jarmusch regulars – from Bill Murray to Tom Waits and Tilda Swinton – this is the writer-director at his most playful. Much like his 2013 vampire movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, it feels like Jarmusch has observed from afar the spate of flesh-eater movies that have populated cinemas these past years, then added his own wry spin on the genre.
The result will please both horror buffs (especially those who dug Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead) and Jarmusch followers.
Set in an American nowhere town, Centerville – “a real nice place”, as the sign says – the main characters are a trio of law enforcers: Driver’s Ronnie Peterson (surely a nod to the actor’s turn as the poet-bus driver in Jarmusch’s Paterson ); Chloë Sevigny’s fragile Mindy Morrison; and Bill Murray’s Clifford Robertson, their de facto leader.
After polar fracking has led the Earth to spin off its axis, the dead start to rise from their graves; soon enough, this wave of icky creatures hits Centerville.
If George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead compared the undead to brain-dead shoppers, Jarmusch takes it a stage further. Here the zombies zero in on their own addictions from when they were alive; chardonnay, Snapple soft drinks and, most amusingly, Wi-fi.
There are a number of pleasing in-jokes: Rosie Perez plays an on-the-spot news reporter called Posie Juarez, while Wu- Tang Clan member RZA is a delivery man for a company called WU-PS.
Not everything works – Selena Gomez’s “hipster” subplot is a dead-end, and the ever-present Sturgill Simpson title track can grate. But with Jarmusch in full-on self-referential mode (Tilda Swinton’s sword-wielding mortification recalls Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai), even going completely meta on us at points, this is surely one of his most accessible and pleasurable films to date.
The undead have never seemed so cool.
