Centerville: A Nice Place to Die

Bill Murray’s relationship with the undead has always felt philosophically appropriate. His detachment, that particular half-smile suggesting he’s observing the world from a great and comfortable distance—it maps cleanly onto both sides of the zombie equation, the shambling corpse and the reluctant survivor. Zombieland figured this out and used it for one of the best cameos in recent film history. Then Jim Jarmusch went ahead and cast him in a full feature.

The Dead Don’t Die assembled a cast that had no business working together and somehow made it feel inevitable: Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny, Tilda Swinton with a samurai sword, Tom Waits narrating from the treeline, and Selena Gomez arriving in a vintage Pontiac like a vision someone had after too much Jarmusch. Selena as blood-drenched apocalypse tourist is exactly as good as it sounds, which is to say better than it has any right to be.

The film is exactly the kind of thing Jarmusch makes: funny in a way that takes a second to register, melancholy in a way that lingers longer than the jokes, formally strange enough that you’re never quite sure if it’s working until it’s already over and it clearly did. It’s not Broken Flowers. It’s not Only Lovers Left Alive, which remains one of the most seductive vampire films made by anyone who understands that seduction requires slowness. But it’s fully itself—a zombie comedy that doesn’t believe in the redemptive power of survival, delivered by people who all seem faintly amused by the situation.

I’ve watched it twice and I’d watch it again. Mainly for Adam Driver’s face, which processes the apocalypse with an expression of serene, administrative resignation that I find genuinely comforting.