The Dead Don’t Die

The zombie genre gets Jarmusched with mild levels of success in The Dead Don’t Die, an often funny, sometimes scary and always amusing horror-comedy effort from director Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch has done horror before, most notably with his atmospheric vampire flick, Only Lovers Left Alive and, some could argue, with the disturbing death meditation Dead Man. His latest effort is as strongly satirical as the director has ever been: The world is falling apart politically, socially and environmentally, and its inhabitants are too slow and dimwitted to really do anything about it. Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny play Sheriff Cliff and his deputies Ronnie and Mindy in a typical American town called Centerville. The pulse of the town is severely laidback and barely beating, with much of one’s day revolving around when to get that good coffee and donuts from their cultural hub, the local diner. Due to polar fracking, the Earth spins off its access, and the dead begin to rise. The days become longer, the electronic gadgets we rely upon go dead, and people start getting unsolicited neck bites from formerly live neighbors. Characters like those played by Murray and Driver react in a way that is so disorganized and disconnected, they practically deserve to die. This, perhaps, is a not-so-veiled statement about our current administration’s strange attitude toward global warming. Actually, there’s no doubt, Jarmusch hates Trump—and this is the first anti-Trump zombie movie.