YOU WON’T DIE LAUGHING
This quirky comedy has its moments, but even stars as big as Adam Driver and Bill Murray can’t bring it to life
The Dead Don’t Die (15) Verdict: So-so zombie comedy ★★★✩✩ Annabelle Comes Home (15) Verdict: Creepy but creaky ★★✩✩✩
Jim JARmUSCH is the determinedly quirky filmmaker whose last picture, 2016’s Paterson, was a small masterpiece about a kindly new Jersey bus driver who wrote poetry in his spare time and loved his wife and dog.
it was a film about an unremarkable but strangely beguiling life.
His new movie, The Dead Don’t Die, has a much more interesting premise, yet is much less beguiling. it’s a social and political satire, presented as comedy-horror.
A U.S. government, presumably not dissimilar to the current one, has started an intensive programme of ‘polar fracking’, which has nudged the earth off its axis with increasingly worrying consequences.
in tiny Centerville, Pennsylvania, the locals have noticed all kinds of peculiar goings-on. The sun won’t go down on time, pets are behaving strangely, and then, to put the tin lid on it, corpses start rising from the graveyard and heading into town for a taste of human flesh. in truth, despite its name, Centerville is already a singular place, a U. S. version of The League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey.
There’s a harmless nutter who lives in the woods, called Hermit Bob (Tom Waits, kind of reprising his lonewolf gold prospector in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), and a benign police chief, Cliff (Bill murray), who reserves his loathing for racist Farmer miller (Steve Buscemi).
Bobby (Caleb Landry Jones), who runs the gas station, is a nerdy movie nut with a suddenly convenient interest in zombie films. And Zelda (Tilda Swinton) is the town’s recently arrived undertaker, an otherworldly Scot who isn’t much good at dressing corpses, but for some reason knows how to wield a samurai sword.
over the years, Jarmusch has assembled what amounts almost to a repertory company of actors.
He also directed Swinton in only Lovers Left Alive ( 2013), which was about vampires, so as a selfconfessed admirer of old Hollywood schlock-horror B-features, maybe it was only ever a matter of time before he got on to zombies.
Adam Driver, the star of Paterson, plays the only person in Centerville who can predict how the zombie crisis will end. He is Cliff’s deputy Ronnie, and the reason he knows what’s going to happen, he says, directly referring to Jarmusch himself, is because he’s read the script.
now, writers and directors take a chance when they break the so-called fourth wall, dismantling the imaginary barrier between a story and its audience. it’s a venerable theatrical conceit dating back k centuries, but right back in vogue.
on television, Phoebe Waller-Bridge e did it in the recent (and fabulous) Fleabag, and so did Suranne Jones, a little more subtly, in the even more recent (and similarly fabulous) Gentleman Jack.
Their conspiratorial glances to camera worked beautifully. But Jarmusch’s assault on the fourth wall fails.
Ronnie’S awareness that he’s an actor just feels like flippant nudge- nudgery and lands with a clunk.
There are other misjudgments, too, in a film which feels far slighter than the sum of its parts, not nearly as dead funny as its creator thinks it is, and a vague waste of a top-notch cast that also includes Chloe Sevigny as a cop and Danny Glover as the local diner’s resident old-timer.
So The Dead Don’t Die — which had the honour of opening this year’s Cannes Film Festival — is certainly not unmissable.
Yet no film with that calibre of cast can be entirely missable, either. Certainly, there are some bona fide treats, not least the
inspired casting of raddled musician iggy Pop (another Jarmusch stalwart) as a coffeefixated zombie.
Could it be that he was tarted up to play one of the undead, not tarted down?
There are lots of cute film references, too. night of The Living Dead director George A Romero gets a namecheck, one of the gravestones bears the name of Samuel Samue Fuller (another old-school Hollywood director), and Cliff’s surname is Robertson, presumably a nod to the oscar-winning actor.
All of which points to a distinct self-indulgence on Jarmusch’s part. But then The Dead Don’t Die is that kind of film.
THe more traditional of this week’s horror releases
is Annabelle Comes Home, the latest in The Conjuring universe, as it’s so grandly known; the series of mostly lacklustre sequels and spin-offs following James Wan’s 2013 hit The Conjuring.
With Wan as the producer and story supervisor this time, Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga once again play Ed and Lorraine Warren, the ‘ demonology consultants’ whose home contains an artefact room in which everything is either cursed or haunted.
Its centrepiece is, of course, the demonic doll Annabelle, which is housed in a locked glass case — as if glass was ever much protection against satanic evil.
A narrative even flimsier than Annabelle’s case then contrives a night away for the Warrens, leaving their young daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) in the care of Mary Ellen the babysitter (Madison Iseman). Would you babysit the daughter of demonology consultants?
I know I wouldn’t, but Mary Ellen is made of sterner stuff. She is joined by her pal Daniela (Katie Sarife), who has some interest in the afterlife, since her own father perished in a car crash with Daniela at the wheel.
All this, it won’t surprise you to learn, is the cue for all hell, more or less literally, to break loose.
Writer-director Gary Dauberman employs every horror-film tactic in the book, inducing a few jumps and lots of shivers but also, it has to be said, plenty of unsought chuckles and one burning question: why have creepy houses in horror films always run out of WD-40?
Even the hinges on the chicken coop creak, although not as loudly as the plot.