A Zombie Movie That Keeps Asking What a Zombie Movie Even Means

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die is a zombie movie that spends most of its runtime asking what a zombie movie even means. The result is a slow, funny, occasionally brilliant mess that knows exactly how much you can stand before it loses you entirely.

Trailer, via Focus Features.

The Premise

In Centerville, a small town, Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) investigate a missing chicken belonging to farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi). As the sun sets, their watches stop working and the dead start walking. What follows is a series of vignettes that loop between the police station, the diner, the gas station and the motel, each one adding another layer of absurdity to the whole thing.

The Cast

Jarmusch has assembled a roster that could fill a stadium. Tilda Swinton plays Zelda Winston, a recent buyer of the funeral home who speaks in riddles. Chloë Sevigny shows up as Officer Mindy Morrison. Tom Waits plays Hermit Bob, a mysterious figure who watches everything unfold. Danny Glover is Hank Thompson, the hardware store owner. Rosie Perez is Posie Juarez, the news anchor. Selena Gomez is Zoe, a young traveler. And RZA is Dean, a delivery worker who hangs with Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones).

It is a remarkable group, and it mostly works.

The Plot

The story is a patchwork quilt of half-baked ideas. Polar fracking is blamed for shifting the Earth’s rotation. A missing cat leads to a motel owner’s discovery of strange behavior in pets. A young trio of travelers (Selena Gomez, Austin Butler, Luka Sabbat) stop for gas and get caught in the chaos. The plot is less a line than a series of rooms you walk through, each one weirder than the last.

The Tone

This is a comedy, but it is also a drama, and a horror movie, and a meditation on mortality. Jarmusch wants all of it at once, and the film wobbles between those modes constantly. Some scenes land with genuine dread. Others feel like sketches waiting for a joke. The pacing is deliberately unhurried, which works when the writing is sharp and fails when it isn’t.

The Running Time

At 104 minutes, the film runs long. The middle section, which tracks the rising dead and the preparations for battle, drags. Characters explain things to each other that the audience already knows, and the repetition starts to wear thin.

The Best Scenes

1. The diner scene, where two corpses kill the staff and Hank Thompson discovers them the next morning.
2. Ronnie teaching Cliff how to kill zombies, a sequence that captures the film’s deadpan humor perfectly.
3. Zelda Winston beheading two corpses at the funeral home with a sword, a moment of pure absurdity.
4. The reveal that Danny Perkins has been turned, which gives the film its most genuinely tense moment.

The Worst Scenes

1. The extended sequence with the young travelers, which feels like filler.
2. The scenes involving the juvenile detention center inmates, which add nothing to the story.
3. The subplot about pets behaving strangely, which goes nowhere.

The Reception

The film premiered at Cannes on May 14, 2019, and was released in North America on June 14, 2019, by Focus Features. It earned $15.3 million at the box office. Critics were mixed, with some praising the cast and others baffled by the direction.

The Verdict

The Dead Don’t Die is a film of moments, not a coherent whole. The best sequences — the diner massacre, the sword-wielding funeral home scene, the zombie attack on the motel — are among the funniest and most unsettling things Jarmusch has ever put on screen. The rest is a slog through a script that can’t decide what it wants to be.

The film is at its best when it commits to its absurdist premise. It is at its worst when it tries to be a conventional thriller. The balance between those two modes is uneven, and the movie suffers for it.

Adam Driver · Bill Murray · Jim Jarmusch · movie review · zombie movie