In the 1980s and 1990s , Jim Jarmusch was a prominent part of a mentally related group of soul mates; a collection of black rockers active in various artistic disciplines, especially film. There were names like Nick Cave, Wim Wenders, the Kaurismäki brothers. Their work was laid-back, a little light-hearted, socially critical, and not infrequently pretentious. Cool.
Lord Byron in leather pie, as well. Those were the days...
Unlike German Wenders and Finnish Kaurismäki, indie icon Jarmush (with a few exceptions) has continued to create catchy fiction. Most recently in sympathetic Paterson but above all before (2013) but the beautifully depressive vampire fantasy Only lovers left alive, where the protagonists of a thinning existence in an age where the media mug smashes the human, makes her blood poisonous - which has fatal consequences for a hemoglobin-driven death. . So easy-to-read social comments in vampyrcape. Which means that the move to zombies is not as far as others wanted to claim before the premiere in Cannes last spring.
Here, too, there is a clear criticism of the hyper-commercialized present that has made us all shopping-crazy zombies stumbling through the mall. Jarmusch armageddon comedy also draws its straw to the Greta Thunberg stack when it is explained that it is the blasts (fracking) of raw materials at the poles of the earth that destroy nature and cause the dead to wander the city streets again.
However, the dead don´t die has none of the charm and elegance of the previous film. Which in itself is perfectly logical, too much can be said about the undead, but they are not particularly elegant.
The whole world is affected, but we are only following the events of the small town with the allegorical name of Centerville, especially when police Cliff, Ronnie and Mindy whose sleepy existence spills to when the undead begin to chew on the living population.
Ronnie (Adam Driver) is already feeling uneasy at the first bloodstained crime scene: "It's probably zombies that have been on the move".
He and everyone else The dead don't die can be said to be prepared for what is to come, thanks to all the zombie fiction that has swept across the media market over the past decade. So an ounce of intertextuality, which is a nice exception to the old rule that the victims in zombie movies never seem to have heard of The Walking Dead and its genre buddies.
But this is also met with well-acted M, even more so than what Jim Jarmusch's films usually are. Adam Driver's character even speaks that he has read the entire script for the movie he himself is in, while his existence is bloody serious. Jarmusch thus makes some chaos with the viewer.
That laid back tone, however, is so severely tilted that it almost falls flat, this is ironic on a level that even puts Henrik Schyffert in the corner. And it's fun, of course, but in the long run a bit well valium marinated. The old indy icon has created an ironic monster that is unhealthily fond of its own drowsiness, which is peppered with a bunch of darlings that Jarmusch might well have killed, to create a tighter tone.
But okay, the star ensemble with favorites like Chloë Sevigny, Bill Murray and Tom Waits in the lead is fun, they do exactly what they're told to do, and it really doesn't hurt to sit the entire 104 minutes of the movie.