The wags who saw Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die at Cannes may have already staked their claim on the George Romero puns – take your pick from Night of the Living Deadpan, Dawn of the Deadpan, Day of the Deadpan – but it makes sense that the eternal hipster of American cinema would make a zombie apocalypse movie. The laconic nature of his films is a natural fit for a sub-genre built around hordes of shuffling flesh-eaters and having already flirted with horror tropes in his arch vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive he further deconstructs the genre (and his own career) with this drolly self-reflexive, fourth-wall-breaking comedy about a sleepy small town called Centerville that comes under siege from the walking dead after something called “polar fracking” throws the Earth off its axis.
