🧟‍♂️ The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

“The film where zombies aren’t the problem — boredom is.”


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🎬 Trailers First

Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers, shall we? 🎥

Since this is a Universal film, Y’all know what that means? Cue Universal Logo!

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🧟 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die sets out to be a quirky, deadpan, artsy zombie comedy. The small town of Centerville becomes the epicenter of a zombie outbreak caused by “polar fracking” (yes, really), and we follow two monotone cops, a katana-swinging mortician, and a town full of eccentrics as the dead rise.

But instead of a sharp satire or fun horror romp, the movie stumbles around like one of its zombies — slow, clumsy, and seemingly unaware it’s dead on its feet.


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👥 Character Rundown

Sheriff Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) – He’s so checked out, it feels like Bill Murray wandered in between golf games. His humor is dry, but not in a clever way — more in a “did he even want to be here?” way.

Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) – He has exactly one running gag, and it works: “This isn’t going to end well.” Beyond that, he’s just stiff, repeating lines like a broken record.

Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton) – A mortician who practices with a katana for reasons never explained, and then randomly gets abducted by aliens in the final act. 🛸

Supporting Cast – Steve Buscemi, Selena Gomez, Tom Waits, and others are criminally underused. The movie has talent but wastes it.



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⏳ Pacing / Episode Flow

The pacing is the biggest zombie here — lifeless and dragging. Scenes stretch on forever with characters mumbling or driving around in silence. By the halfway mark, it feels less like a movie and more like a parody of boredom.


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✅ Pros

The “This isn’t going to end well” gag. It’s genuinely funny, especially when it turns meta.

Adam Driver and Bill Murray manage some chuckles with their back-and-forth.

A few creative zombie quirks, like the undead moaning about coffee or Wi-Fi.



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❌ Cons

Almost no energy. The movie is relentlessly monotone.

Characters feel undercooked and wasted.

Meta humor that thinks it’s clever but comes off smug.

A third act so absurd and abrupt it kills any goodwill you had left.

The dialog and messaging gets hammered to us with all the subtlety of a sludgehammer.

The lines are especially the worse, the lines range from well thats strange, this isnt gonna end well, and zombies. Yeah copy and paste that through the film and u got this film.

🧟 The Selena Gomez Zombie Clocking Scene (a.k.a. Proof the Script Was Out of Order)

Let’s talk about one of the dumbest scenes in The Dead Don’t Die. The teenagers roll into town — Selena Gomez and her little group — and wander into the nerd’s shop. Instead of, you know, acting like normal travelers or asking about the town, the dude immediately says something along the lines of: “Oh, you must have a zombie problem here.”

Hold up. How? How the hell would they know that? At this point in the movie, literally two zombies have shown up on screen. They killed a couple of baristas at a diner, drank their coffee, and shuffled off. That’s it. No horde, no outbreak, no panic. Nobody in town has even seen them yet, much less connected the dots that “yup, full zombie apocalypse incoming.”

So why are these random newcomers instantly clocking it like they’re reading the script ahead of time? It feels like the editor shuffled scenes out of order — like we skipped straight from “this is a weird night” to “welp, zombies exist and we all know it.” It completely kills the slow-burn discovery phase that zombie movies thrive on.

Instead of tension, we get characters who act like they’ve read the back of the DVD case. It’s lazy, it’s sloppy, and it makes the entire flow of the movie feel like somebody lost a reel and just hoped nobody would notice.

The Diner “Bear Attack” Gag (aka How to Kill a Joke in Real Time)
One of the clearest examples of this movie’s humor problem happens in the diner scene. Bill Murray walks in, sees the mauled baristas, and dryly suggests maybe it was a bear attack. Then Adam Driver shows up, goes inside, looks at the exact same crime scene, and delivers the exact same line. Then the third cop (the female officer) arrives, goes in, looks around, and — you guessed it — repeats the same thing again.

This is supposed to be the running gag: “Haha, small-town cops are all clueless, they think it’s just animals.” The issue is the film doesn’t build on it or add a twist — it’s just the same beat, played three times in a row with no escalation. What could’ve been mildly funny once dies on the vine, and by the third repetition, it’s not satire anymore, it’s dead air. The actors are flat, the timing is limp, and the joke overstays its welcome to the point of becoming unbearable.

👉 It perfectly sums up why the humor here doesn’t land: the movie mistakes repetition for wit.

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💭 Final Thoughts

This is what happens when an arthouse director decides to parody zombie movies without understanding why they’re fun. Instead of laughs or scares, you get a slow burn that never catches fire. The cast feels wasted, the writing is flat, and the ending makes you want to roll your eyes into another dimension.

Also oh yeah its an extremely boring film.


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⭐ Rating

4/10


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning ⚠️

Beyond this point lies the undead truth.


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💀 Spoilers

The one shining light is the recurring gag where Ronnie keeps saying, “This isn’t going to end well.” It’s funny because it’s so blunt — and when Cliff finally asks what he means, Ronnie just shrugs and says he’s read the script. Bill Murray reacts with pure confusion: “I didn’t get the whole script.” For a brief second, the movie nails the meta-joke, and it works.

But after that, it nosedives into absurdity. The zombies shuffle around craving coffee and Wi-Fi, which could’ve been biting satire if the movie leaned harder into it. Instead, it feels like a throwaway gag that never develops. Selena Gomez’s character gets built up, then suddenly killed offscreen. Characters vanish from the plot without explanation. And the biggest insult? The ending.

Zelda, the katana-wielding mortician, turns out not to be eccentric but an alien. A UFO literally beams her up and flies off into the sky. It comes out of nowhere. No setup, no payoff, just pure randomness. And it’s not awe-inspiring — it’s laughable. By that point, the audience isn’t invested enough to say, “Wow, that’s wild.” Instead, it’s, “Aliens? Really? Okay, sure, whatever. Are we done yet?”

The final scenes are flat, joyless, and leave you wondering if the filmmakers even cared. It doesn’t feel like satire. It doesn’t feel like parody. It feels like they ran out of ideas and decided to toss in the weirdest twist possible just to fill the runtime.

By the time credits roll, you’re not entertained — you’re exhausted.

👽 The Mortician Alien Ending (…Wait, What?)

And then we hit the finale — if you can even call it that. The mortician lady, who already felt like a bizarre mashup of quirks (mortician + dojo sensei + katana master… why?), suddenly gets revealed as an alien. Yeah. An alien. Out of nowhere. She just looks up at the sky and beam me up, Scotty! She’s gone.

No buildup, no payoff, no connection to the zombie storyline. It’s like the writers got bored, shrugged, and said: “Sure, why not, she’s an alien. Are we done yet?”

Instead of resolving the apocalypse, the movie just… hands us this nonsense twist like it’s clever. Spoiler: it’s not. It’s lazy. It feels less like a planned ending and more like a writer’s room dare: “Bet you won’t turn the mortician into an alien in the final five minutes.”

👉 It’s not horror, it’s not comedy — it’s just nonsense for the sake of nonsense.