The outset is familiar: there was a global apocalypse, the world began to change and the dead came out of the ground. And the viewer is shown how such an invasion is coped with by a tiny American town with a population of just over 700 people. Civilization - it is somewhere out there, far away, but the problems with the dead are not local.
At first, the film resembles "Zombies by the name of Sean" with a slightly muted and turned out differently comedy component. In the first half there were moments, jokes, some small details that made the film look more like the creation of Edgar Wright, rather than Jarmusch - yes, a little slower, but still primarily comedy. But at some point, SQÜRL's melancholic soundtrack began to burst into his ears, under which worrying landscapes were running in front of his eyes, Iggy Pop's grave was climbing out, Tilda Swinton's katana was practicing - and it became clear that this comedy was abundantly bitterly watered with bitterness.
From the very beginning, Adam Driver's character, one of the police officers, says it won't end well and repeats it word for word throughout the story. Bill Murray, who has played his boss, tries to shake him up, but soon he himself cannot stand the pressure of what is happening. Chloe Sevigny, their colleague is not very ready for a zombie invasion, and is coping with the stress by screaming.
Other characters are caricaturic too - here and the nearby owner of the cafe in the face of Esther Balint, and familiar from "Three billboards" Caleb Landry Jones in the role of a slightly uninhabited geek salesman in the store of all sorts of things at the gas station, ...and a nationalist farmer with a face like Steve Bushemi, and a hermit like Tom Waits, who has taken the position of a noninteractive observer in this slow apocalypse, and, of course, the totally unearthly Tilda Swinton, who has mastered iido. All this hypertrophied in its one-dimensional set of characters, pale, simple - it perfectly reflects the fading of the American countryside, making the film a little more monotonous, and the unexpected splashes of jokes and successful moves become brighter against this oatmeal.
And the beauty of jokes lies in their indifference, in their clumsiness. They are served in the forehead, some kind of special horizons in order to smile, do not need - Jarmusch does not seem to want to be in the process of watching his film somehow strongly thought. He just tells the story of how a tiny town fought a zombie invasion. He wasn't very effective, to be honest, just repeating, like a mantra, that zombies had to be beaten in the head - and instead of the blood from the dead's arteries that were already out of order, black dust was pulled out.
In this zombie apocalypse, there is no congestion, no dexterity, no sense of motivation for the exploits of struggle. There is fatigue, indifference, even obedience, soaked in sadness. There is no horror. There is no fear. There is nothing. And from this, in general, the zombie apocalypse shown in the film looks even more frightening than its classic variants, filled with screens, growls, splashing blood fountains around, hot speeches of the main characters about the salvation of mankind or at least a small group of people, some hope. In Jarmusch's painting, the heroes don't care. But so it is conceived.
Zombies in the film are hunting not only for food in the form of fresh human meat, but also for those things that attracted them in life. Someone is looking for Wi-Fi, someone is trying to kick the ball on the football field, someone wants to get to the candy, wine or coffee. Jarmusch is telling us that we, blinded by our materialistic desires, turned into zombies in our lifetime, replacing our souls with bodywishers. And, most unexpectedly, he does not give an answer to the question of what to do with it.
In today's Jarmusch, this desire to stand on a stool in a white coat is very acutely visible and to tell the world that everyone but him lives wrong. And despite Jarmusch's inherent poetry and otherness, which he did not get rid of even in this picture, his statements are more like a sober conversation at four o'clock in the morning in the kitchen. When promises are made to go to the gym, change jobs, start sorting trash, stop buying t-shirts, leave a toxic partner - and after a drunken restless sleep all promises are forgotten.
And Jarmusch, it seems, understands very well that his picture will not encourage anyone to really think deeply about his life, about what is going on around him. And he reflects this in the final, which at first confuses with simplicity, and after all, a little bit, but happy. The main taste of this film is the bitter irony, all this atmosphere of inevitability and inevitability, which can be accepted, perhaps, only by phlegmatically shrugging.