Review: Director Jim Jarmusch puts his deadpan stamp on The Dead Dont Die

With The Dead Don't Die, auteur director Jim Jarmusch puts his unique, deadpan stamp on this staple of the horror genre. As one might expect, Jarmusch's vision is more ironically cerebral than your typical zombie fare and a bit less viscerally horrifying—even when the aforementioned dead are chowing down on their victims' viscera. It's not a perfect film, but it's got Tilda Swinton brandishing a katana with deadly accuracy against the undead. What's not to love?

(Some spoilers below.)

Zombies might seem an odd choice of subject matter for this longtime darling of the Cannes Film Festival crowd. Jarmusch's career took off in 1984 with his first major film, Stranger Than Paradise. Shot entirely in black-and-white (a signature of the director's early work), the film won the Caméra D'Or at Cannes that year and established the director as a rising creative force in arthouse cinema.

Movies like Dead Man, Mystery Train, Down by Law, Night on Earth, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai further cemented his auteur status. In 2005, Jarmusch won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Broken Flowers, which starred Bill Murray as a middle-aged man searching for the mother of the son he never met. And Jarmusch is no stranger to unusual takes on traditional horror stories, as evidenced by his 2013 "crypto-vampire love story," Only Lovers Left Alive.

The trailer dropped in April, raising hopes that the genre might be tailor-made for Jarmusch's idiosyncratic style and ultra-dry wit—especially given the rise in zombie-themed comic horror over the last 15 years, starting with 2004's Shaun of the Dead. The director's vision harkens back to classic George Romero zombies (Romero originally called them "ghouls"): they're slow, shuffling, barely sentient creatures who aren't particularly discriminating in their diet, in that they'll eat any part of the human body, not just brains. And they're easily offed by destroying the head—at least until their numbers grow so large that they simply outnumber and overpower any humans in their way.

The humans in this case are the residents of a small rural town called Centerville. They start to notice some strange phenomena, possibly due to fracking at the polar ice caps knocking the Earth off its axis. Somehow (Jarmusch wisely doesn't bother coming up with a better explanation) this serves to reanimate the dead, with predictably terrible consequences for the people of Centerville. It's up to Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and Officer Ronald "Ronnie" Peterson (Adam Driver) to keep the town safe from the growing zombie horde—a task for which they are woefully unprepared, despite Ronnie's handy knowledge of zombie lore.