Jim Jarmusch’s zombie “comedy” is animated by boredom, malice for the general public, and the most ridiculous Tilda Swinton cameo ever.
In the middle of its dry wit and consciously slow pace, The Dead Don’t Die is an anomaly of a film. It will never make you laugh, but it will make you constantly aware of its crawlingly slow speed. Despite it is consistently funny and doesn’t induce any kind of boredom. Jarmusch gives us a marriage of Andersonian monotone delivery and Coenesque subdued direction, staying distinct from both styles, while also never reaching the heights of either.
On a more problematic note, its politics are some of the most irritating I’ve seen in a modern film. With a distracting number of references to polar fracking, it comes off as preachy (everyone hates fracking; but this plotpoint is near constant, not to mention that somehow everyone in this southern American town is unspokenly against fracking). It also commonly features a strangely timid and irrational female main character, with no satire being placed on her nor any sense as to why she acts that way at all. She’s simply an unironic stereotype in a 2019 horror movie.
And the most egregious, its ending monologue, in which the thesis statement of the film is that it has been allegedly anti-materialist this whole time.
First of all, that was not a theme presented in 99% of your entire fucking movie (before, we’d seen little more than zombies spouting out the names of material goods that they’d internalized as part of their identity while alive. This was one montage of such, and one explicit mention, nothing more), and secondly, you’ve decided to have social commentary on materialism in your zombie movie, and you took the easiest possible route to take? That is, blaming the consumer for their need to consume. Ignore the capitalist systems that enable and uphold materialism, and point your finger at the individual as the culprit. It’s not as if they’ve been conditioned to be a part of the cycle of consumption by a society whose best interests are the same as that of the market owner, no, no, no! They did it to themselves.
Nonetheless, its quirkiness remains endearing and Tilda Swinton as a samurai Gollum is the best character in any movie ever. The Dead Don’t Die is a paradoxically enjoyable and irritating experience, one that I’m sure I will never endure again, and not one I would ever recommend. To reanimate such an affair, I’m sure, would leave me dead asleep on my couch in no time.
