Jim Jarmusch’s zombie pic to open 72nd Cannes Film Festival and Palm race

While we have to wait till Thursday 18 April for the full official line-up at this year’s Cannes film festival, the word is out about the opening film, US director Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.  As the title suggests, it's a zombie film.

Jim Jarmusch in Cannes in 2013. His film 'The Dead Don't Die' will open the 72nd Cannes Film Festival on 14 May 2019 wikipedia

Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop, Tilda Swinton, Chloé Sévigny and Tom Waits, are among the director’s firm favourites.

Known for their deadpan command of comedy, or for their irreverent attitudes, this cast suggests that the film is likely to prompt more scoffs than screams.

Of his 12 films to date, Broken Flowers, won the Grand Prix in 2005, while his Stranger than Paradise helped make his name in 1984 winning the first-feature award, the Caméra  d’Or, the Golden Camera.

Jarmusch has played with milder forms of the horror genre in the past with the vampirical and richly coloured Only Lovers Left Alive five years ago, also with Tilda Swinton, while the black and white Dead Man in 1995 with Johnny Depp, was a mysterious Western.

Keeping its finger on the pulse, without falling into anything unpalatably ghoulish, the festival has opted for, from what can be seen from publicly available extracts, a more subtle or even as the festival says, “subversive” approach to the genre.

The Dead Don’t Die is also one of the films that will be competing for the Golden Palm to be awarded on 26^th May.  It goes on general release in France on 14 May, the day the festival opens, and in the US in June.