‘The Dead Don’t Die’ Ending, Explained

The Dead Don’t Die is a 2019 horror comedy about zombies, a previously established niche subgenre that also includes beloved cult classics Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. The movie was directed by Jim Jarmusch, whose name may be recognizable to fans of vampire media as the director of Only Lovers Left Alive. The movie also had a lot of star power behind it, including Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Danny Glover, and Selena Gomez, just to name a few.

Despite the talented director behind the camera and an esteemed cast in front of it, The Dead Don’t Die received middling reviews and has mostly been forgotten in the five years since its release. With 54% on RottenTomatoes and 53% on Metacritic, it’s easy to see why audiences, whether deserved or not, have allowed the film to join the ranks of underrated horror comedies.

What is “The Dead Don’t Die” About?

The Dead Don’t Die tells the story of a small town affected by the unexpected reanimation of the dead. In Centreville, the rural town where the story takes place, the characters are going about their normal lives, completely unaware of how abnormal their lives are about to get when suddenly, the dead start rising. The rest of the film focuses on a few members of this small community trying to survive this new normal they find themselves in, including Police Chief Cliff Robertson, played by Murray and Deputy Ronnie Peterson, played by Driver. Ronnie is the first to conclude that zombies may be behind the recent murders in town and serves as the zombie expert, teaching his boss everything he knows about zombies, including how to kill them.

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When they return to the station, they must convince their coworker, Deputy Mindy Morrison, played by Chloe Sevigny, that the dead are rising. When the body of a local addict comes back to life in the police station, Deputy Morrison comes to accept the impossible and realizes that Ronnie and Cliff are telling the truth. However, she seems to have a harder time dealing with it than the other two. Meanwhile, other town members are shown to be dealing with this new zombie problem as best they can – with some of them being attacked and transformed while others face off and fight off the zombies for as long as they can. All the town’s events seem to be observed from afar by Hermit Bob, played by Tom Waits – a character the audience knows very little about and who seems to serve as a tangible representation of the audience’s point of view.

Another member added to this ragtag group of zombie killers is Zelda Winston, Tilda Swinton’s character, who owns the local funeral home. When corpses start to reanimate around her, she beheads them with a sword, proving herself to be incredibly capable and formidable. After encountering the undead, Zelda heads to the police station and meets up with Ronnie, Cliff, and Mindy, rounding out the main group of characters that the film follows.

How Does it End, and What Does it Mean?

As the action rises and the climax nears, the movie gets increasingly chaotic and nonsensical, starting with Ronnie and Cliff breaking the fourth wall. Ronnie tells Cliff that he knows all of this isn’t going to end well because Jim, referring to the director, gives him the script for the whole movie, while Cliff reveals that he is only given the script pages for his own scenes. This breaks the film’s immersion and brings the audience out of the world previously built by the movie. The use of meta jokes comes from nowhere and doesn’t seem to have much point or direction.

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The film ends with further realizing that Zelda, this ethereal character, is not of this world. A UFO appears over the cemetery where the characters are, and Zelda is beamed up, presumably to rejoin her own people, before the UFO flies off into the night sky. After seeing this and having no further questions or strong reactions, Ronnie and Cliff get out of the car and start fighting off the zombies surrounding them. This horde includes people that the two know, including their former colleague Mindy. The focus then shifts over to Hermit Bob, who is still watching all of this unfold from afar through binoculars. He laments that the world is a terrible place right before Ronnie and Cliff are overtaken by the zombies – presumably to be killed and transformed themselves, leaving Hermit Bob and Zelda as the only two characters who survived.

Ultimately, it feels at times that the filmmakers didn’t know how to end this movie, so they decided to attempt a meta-comedy with absurdist reveals. There wasn’t any real setup for the film to descend into that level of nonsense, so it feels like a sharp tonal shift and doesn’t entirely work. There are also only surface-level attempts to explain why the dead start rising. Ultimately, the lack of consistency in tone and style leaves this film feeling uneven and half-baked. It has some great comedic moments, and there’s no shortage of talent both behind and in front of the camera, but it fails to reach its full potential.

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4.5
/5

The Dead Don’t Die

Release Date

June 14, 2019

Runtime

103minutes

Cast

Tom Waits
, Selena Gomez
, Austin Butler
, Adam Driver
, Chloe Sevigny
, Bill Murray
, Danny Glover
, Tilda Swinton
, Steve Buscemi
, Caleb Landry Jones
, Iggy Pop