The world is off its axis, the climate's out of whack, and the population is a mindless horde marching to the drumbeat of rampaging materialism.

Meanwhile, in Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die, impending global catastrophe is about to unleash a plague of flesh-eating zombies on the small town of Centreville USA. It's "total planetary destruction", as one of the film's savvy teen delinquents puts it, and not without good reason.



The veteran New York director of Down By Law, Dead Man, and Broken Flowers — who emerged from the city's No Wave art scene during the late 1970s — reunites many of his repertory players for this undead throwback, including Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, RZA, and Adam Driver, the latter so mesmerising in Jarmusch's last film, Paterson.

Carol Kane plays Mallory O'Brien, a zombie who yearns for a glass of chardonnay. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures/Frederick Elmes )

Cruising around town listening to the movie's title song (a recurring punchline delivered by country singer Sturgill Simpson), Murray and Driver play deadpan cops whose beat sees them mostly dealing with local crackpots, like Waits' Monty Python-esque, woodland-dwelling vagrant — a prophetic hobo and chicken thief who's given to gravelly doomsday pronouncements — and Buscemi's racist farmer, crowned by a red cap with the nonsensical slogan "Keep America White Again".

Producer Carter Logan says Jarmusch has utilised horror movie conventions to parody "the absurdity of our present times". ( Supplied: Focus Features/Frederick Elmes )

Across town, a gas station clerk and local pop culture nerd — Caleb Landry Jones (Get Out), sporting a Nosferatu t-shirt and Night of the Living Dead badge — is on hand to helpfully dispense horror movie portents to passers by, John Carpenter and David Cronenberg posters proudly displayed on the wall behind him.

Something evil is definitely in the air, and it's not just the purple-ringed full moon. As Driver mutters, and not for the last time: "This is all gonna end badly", a refrain that runs like a droll punctuation mark through the film's cheerful gallows humour.

The Dead Don't Die is inspired by and references the much-loved low-budget 1968 horror film Night of the Living Dead. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures/Frederick Elmes )

Because this is a Jarmusch film, the first undead we encounter — middle-aged punk rocker types played by, of course, Iggy Pop and the director's longtime partner and collaborator, Sara Driver — head straight for the late-night diner, where they proceed to slug pots of steaming hot black coffee and snack on the unlucky wait staff.

The sight of Pop, dead-eyed and grotesquely gnawing on a small intestine like a dog with a butcher's sausage, is worth the proverbial price of admission alone.

Singer-songwriter Iggy Pop plays Coffee Zombie in the film. ( Supplied: Focus Features/Abbot Genser )

"I'm thinking zombies, you know, ghouls — the undead," says Driver, rolling up to the crime scene in a red convertible Smart car (presumably the largest vehicle he can afford).

As the outbreak begins to spread, the town's visiting mortician, Zelda, a samurai sword-wielding albino Scot played by — who else — Tilda Swinton, seems suspiciously well-prepared for the invasion. Zelda is fond of making up her straight-faced clients as Leigh Bowery performance pieces, and typing via a glowing-green matrix computer screen, like some half-human anime character from Ghost in the Shell.

Refreshingly, Jarmusch has skewed his movie toward an old-school zombie flavour, less The Walking Dead than I Walked With A Zombie, with a deliberate embrace of George Romero — in particular 1978's Dawn of the Dead, with its lumbering ghouls an enduring metaphor for unchecked consumerism.

Tilda Swinton, who plays a mysterious samurai-wielding Scottish mortician, discussed her character with Jarmusch before he started writing the script. ( Supplied: Universal Pictures/Sandro Kopp )

It's not exactly subtle — a gripe levelled against the movie when it opened the Cannes Film Festival back in May, with some complaining that Jarmusch, like so many corny liberals, had somehow succumbed to a feeble age-of-Trump tantrum.



And the director's anti-technology screeds — reserving his luddite disdain for the zombies still glued to their smartphones — play into his worst artisanal rock-n-roll tendencies.

But while Jarmusch is often lumped in with indifferent hipster auteurs, there's always been an attentive sense of America's cultural anxiety to his work, and a stream of political anger that threatens to boil over — from the Native American genocide reverie of Dead Man to the post-traumatic stress of Paterson — two films that distilled national tragedy to personal poetry.

Jarmusch wrote the script with actors Bill Murray, Chloe Sevigny and Tilda Swinton in mind, before casting them. ( Supplied: Focus Features )

In eschewing the zombie movie's modern plight — the jokey fanboy-isms of Shaun of the Dead, the dreaded office joke term "zombie apocalypse" — Jarmusch sketches an eerily dissolute culture fatally detached from reality, where horror inspires shrugged-off meta jokes that fold in upon themselves with disarming ease.



Shot like a lucid dream by veteran cinematographer Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet), the film's oddball simulacrum of life — where the humans can seem less animated than the zombies — even recalls David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, another work that charted an absurdist malaise spreading across a nation in the grip of evil.

Jarmusch says teenagers guide culture, and the reason they never transform into undead beings in his film is because they represent hope and the future. ( Supplied: Universal/Abbot Genser )

"Look at all of you, so very ravenous," says Zelda, staring down a sea of zombies she's about to dispatch, "but well past your expiration date." It's a gag line turned jaded assessment of humanity, and matched by the kind of potent images — a painterly tableau of zombies clawing at Buscemi's racist; desperate faces bathed in the sickly red and blue of police lights — that can't help but speak to the moment.

Singer-songwriter Tom Waits plays Hermit Bob, an eccentric town local who lives in the forest and used to go to school with Police Chief Robertson (Bill Murray). ( Supplied: Universal Pictures/Abbot Genser )

By the time that Waits, serving as the movie's conscience, is paraphrasing Melville and rambling about the "ghost people" and their desperate materialism, the Dead Don't Die has become something palpably angry.



Lest things get too sincere, Jarmusch's ambivalence — itself a symptom of the world he shows us — tempers the fury, reminding the audience that there's nothing funnier than the end of the world.

Wu-Tang Clan's RZA is a frequent Jarmusch collaborator and plays Dean, a wise delivery man in the sleepy town of Centerville. ( Supplied: Focus Features )

The director even razzes himself, mocking big city hipsters and rock zombies with a desperate lust for "guitaaaaaaaaaars!", fully aware of his own complicity in the great carnival of capitalism. After all, what is his movie if not another product to be consumed?

As RZA says here, on the eve of impending doom: "The world is perfect — appreciate the details".

The Dead Don't Die is in cinemas from September 26.

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