The Dead Don't Die (2019)

Jim Jarmusch has assembled a remarkable ensemble and pointed it at the end of the world, which he treats as an inconvenience roughly equivalent to a broken wristwatch. Centerville's police force, Bill Murray and Adam Driver, shuffles through the investigation with the enthusiasm of men who have already read the ending. They have, in fact, read it, and the film's central joke is that cosmic doom arrives on schedule while nobody can be bothered to panic. Tilda Swinton's sword-carrying undertaker and Chloë Sevigny's rattled Officer Mindy hold their own in this company, though the film regards them as genre furniture, not arguments.

The social consciousness on display is ambient. A farmer wears a red hat announcing the country he would prefer, and the joke lands because nobody dignifies it with a response. The town is quietly multiracial in a way rural zombie pictures rarely bother with, and the three inmates at the detention center get a few minutes of their own before the chaos swallows them. None of this is announced. The apocalypse, however, is announced repeatedly. Polar fracking has knocked the planet off its axis, and the dead rise because we would not stop drilling. That is a message, delivered with a straight face and a shrug. The zombies themselves return to the consumer goods they loved in life. Coffee. Fashion. Gadgets. A wry observation about appetite, not a sermon.

Where the film declines to lecture, it also declines to conclude. Hermit Bob watches from the woods and mutters that the world is a terrible place, which is as close as Jarmusch comes to a thesis, and then the zombies eat everyone. The fourth wall falls early and stays down. Driver's officer explains that he knows how this ends because the director handed him the entire script. It is a clever bit of exhaustion, and it drains the stakes as efficiently as it entertains. We are left with a handsome, sleepy, mildly irritated apocalypse. It says something. It simply will not raise its voice to say it.