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I often anticipate the end of the world. Death by earthquake, death by virus, death by oligarchy. These are the worries that keep me up at night. These are the worries I find myself writing about, over and over and over again.
Death by zombies is my escape. The other ways are too possible to think about for any extended period of time without raising my blood pressure to unsustainable levels. But zombies aren’t real, and that’s why I like them so much.
Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 movie “The Dead Don’t Die” is a deeply bizarre zombie film. It stars Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Danny Glover, and Selena Gomez (to name just a few) as they contend with a lunar catastrophe that messes with the daylight hours in the made-up town of Centerville, Pennsylvania (“a real nice place” as the town’s welcome plaque declares), and wakes up the dead.
Unlike other zombie movies of recent memory – “Zombieland,” “World War Z,” “28 Days Later,” – “The Dead Don’t Die” is not the action-packed thriller you might expect it to be, in large part because of this small-town setting. Instead, it’s a darkly funny and deeply mundane movie that breaks the fourth wall in unexpected ways, starting with the film’s name itself, which is the title of a Sturgill Simpson song that’s played several times throughout the movie.
It first plays on the car radio as police Chief Robertson (who is played by Bill Murray) and his fellow cop, Ronnie, (played by Adam Driver), make a routine patrol. “Wow, that sounds so familiar,” Chief Robertson remarks as they listen to the song’s first lines. “Why does it sound so familiar?”
“Well, because it’s the theme song,” Ronnie replies matter-of-factly. The theme song of what? He doesn’t specify, but with that comment alone, the viewer gets the sense that this isn’t just any old zombie movie.
While the first murders-by-zombies occur soon after this exchange, much of the first half of “The Dead Don’t Die” is subdued and slow. If you look forward to constant blood and death from your zombie movies, you won’t get it here. What you can expect is a glimpse at the more mundane moments of people’s lives – the gas station attendants, the juvenile delinquents, the funeral home director. In this movie, the mundanity of boiling water for coffee or hunching over a crossword exists even during the apocalypse, perhaps more so because of the apocalypse.
Much like the real-life crises we’re living through (the Covid-19 pandemic, wars, climate disasters), there’s a lot of waiting involved with the end of the world. Two of the characters hole up in a hardware store as they wait for the zombies, the only question not a matter of if they will come but when. Time shrinks and expands all at once.
“The Dead Don’t Die” is categorized as an absurdist comedy. Absurd is one way to put it, but the other way is human. There are no good or bad guys in this movie; instead, it’s filled with a motley crew of characters who, just like the rest of us, have no idea what’s going on most of the time. They do what they’re capable of under stress they never asked for, and a lot of the time things don’t end up working as they’d like. “The Dead Don’t Die” foregoes heroes in place of real people.
The phrase “this isn’t gonna end well” is repeated by several characters, but most often by Ronnie, the aforementioned cop, who seems to have a prescience about how all of it will end. Whether that “it” is the fate of his town, his life, or the movie itself – well, that’s for the viewer to find out.
The Dead Don’t Die is currently streaming on Netflix and is also available to rent or buy on digital video on demand (VOD) platforms.
This article first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, recommendations, retrospectives, and more. Join the mailing list today to have future editions delivered straight to your inbox.
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