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THE DEAD DON’T DIE Deadpan love letter to the zombie genre from director Jim Jarmusch
Jim Jarmusch addresses the state of the American nation and global ecological catastrophe in this deadpan zombie movie that goes straight for the jugular by placing Steve Buscemi’s racist farmer in a MAGA-style cap that simply states ‘Keep America White Again’. Jarmusch puts his own unique stamp on the living dead by making the humans criminally dumb and apathetic, and the zombies thirsty for coffee, wifi and candy. It’s also a love letter
to the late horror legend George A Romero, with direct nods galore. Amassing a cast of stellar collaborators such as Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Adam Driver, RZA and Tom Waits, Jarmusch leads the viewer through small-town America with a host of typically idiosyncratic characters. Swinton, as a Scottish samurai sword-wielding mortician, works her usual magic, and Caleb Landry Jones serves up the goods as a horror
geek / gas attendant. It’s the visual gags, such as Driver’s cop dramatically swerving up to a gory crime scene in a tiny Smart car, that keep the blood pumping, while Jarmusch bites down hard on capitalism, consumerism and race relations in a fi lm that’s akin to Joe Dante’s Matinee in its satire of wilfully destructive human behaviour. (Katherine McLaughlin) ■ General release from Fri 12 Jul ●●●●●
1 Jun–31 Aug 2019 THE LIST 89