D/S: Jim Jarmusch. P: Joshua Astrachan. Music: SQÜRL. Cast: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Tilda Swinton, Iggy Pop.

Ever wondered how the zombie apocalypse of Dawn of the Dead might play out inside the deadpan, affectless universe of Jim Jarmusch? Unfortunately that question has been answered by Jarmusch himself, with his 2019 ensemble “horror comedy” The Dead Don’t Die: a depressingly pointless (and witless) trudge through every genre cliche imaginable, further proof of the decline of a once-great talent towards utter creative bankruptcy. Jarmusch’s unrelentingly tedious vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) at least had the merits of cool music (by Jarmusch’s own band SQÜRL) and some moodily atmospheric night photography of desolate, empty streets in Detroit—a nice visual counterpoint to the existential nihilism of his vampire protags. Dead Don’t Die by contrast is completely without interest—a film which, even in a world that didn’t already contain Return of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead and the two Zombieland comedies, could only be judged a futile bore.  Jarmusch adds nothing to what has gone before, plodding from one aimless setup to the next without any sense of narrative purpose; most gobsmackingly of all, he has the nerve to plagiarise Dawn’s “consumer zombies” subtext in a piece of shockingly lazy dialogue trotted out around the halfway mark, AS IF IT WERE A FRESHLY-MINTED INSIGHT. Wow.

As for the ensemble cast, we have Bill Murray sleepwalking through his THIRD zombie comedy (he’s in both Zombieland features, too); Iggy Pop in a Celebrity Zombie cameo (hired presumably because he required no special makeup for the role); and Tilda Swinton as, oh dear, a Kill Bill-style samurai mortician who turns out to be some sort of extraterrestrial ethnographer (and is whisked away at the end by—what else?—a flying saucer). How very “zany”. Oh yes, there’s also a bunch of comic-book store kids clued-up on zombie lore, just to give you some idea of the wildly original ideas on display here.

Adding to the make-it-up-as-we-go-along feel, Jarmusch throws in a few totally random “meta” touches as the cast break the fourth wall now and then—at one point Murray deadpans to his co-star “Are we improvising now?”, which plays like a piece of bored improv Jarmusch decided to keep in, in a “fuck it, why not” gesture. (Even worse is Murray’s later riposte to a character who asks him how he knows that they’re all going to die: “Because I’ve read the script.” That’s exactly the kind of line the present writer might have put into his own witless spoof scripts, aged 13; to see it echoed here by a world-renowned filmmaker, aged 67, is frankly embarrassing.) As for why the dead rise, oh, who cares—maybe it’s the endless replaying of Sturgill Simpson’s awful C&W song, also titled “The Dead Don’t Die”, throughout the film. Its ubiquity leads to the one marginally funny scene in the film, when a character angrily ejects the CD from his car stereo and hurls it out of the window. One sympathises.