OVERVIEW
We Bury the Dead is a bleak character study set in a zombie-populated world. A military experiment goes wrong and nearly destroys the region of Tasmania, leaving many dead and the “survivors” in a zombie-like state. With the area still restricted, body retrieval units are sent in to identify the affected and bring closure to those left behind. American Ava (Daisy Ridley) joins one of them to locate her husband, who was in the region on a work trip at the time of the catastrophe. Since the zone she needs to reach remains off-limits, Ava and her unit partner, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), break away from their posts and venture into the wasteland by themselves. Through flashbacks, the film reveals that her marriage was already strained, framing the search as a psychological journey as much as a physical one.
BACKGROUND
The film is written and directed by Zak Hilditch and is inspired by his own journey of coming to terms with inevitable outcomes, shaped in part by his mother’s long battle with cancer. He frames it as an “intimate” zombie film, in which the undead serve as the backdrop for a study of grief and reckoning. That was part of the appeal to Daisy Ridley, whose post-Star Wars career has been defined by indies and characters forced to face the past.
EXECUTION
The film offers impressive scope for a low-budget apocalyptic movie. It provides a palpable sense of dread, working better in the genre moments than in the dramatic and contemplative ones.
It has a very effective opener that captures the audience’s attention by showing the tragedy unfolding through the film’s most potent images. The impact of those scenes carries through the more intimate ones, leaving a lasting sense of unease. Similar films often struggle to make it feel like a lived-in world with outside consequences. Such is not the case with We Bury the Dead. It sells the scale so well that you stay immersed and stop asking questions about its world, even if the logic starts to fall apart once you step back and think about it, like how quickly the military decides the undead must be exterminated, yet how slow they do it, and how easy it seems for others to get into the restricted zone.
For the most part, it moves quickly enough, making good use of its tight 95-minute runtime. The action scenes involving the zombies are pretty good and unsettling, the highlight being an overhead shot of one chasing Ava through a bus on the road where we see the action through broken windows. There are jump scares as well, and most lean on the awful “nightmare” trope (these characters sure have a lot of them), which is a shame. Still, the design and execution of the zombies do their job and keep you constantly tense.
Unfortunately, the atmosphere and the occasional well-executed action scenes are marred by numerous derivative narrative choices. We get a tired flashback structure, the familiar suggestion that there is still some humanity left in these zombie-like creatures, and the usual idea that the monsters people should fear most are often the humans who are still alive. At this point, all of it feels like an obligatory checklist for zombie films. The film’s structure is very episodic, which keeps the stakes constantly restarting. The director called 28 Days Later an inspiration, yet it often feels like The Last of Us redux, with rhythms that echo an “encounter-of-the-week” structure rather than the consistent buildup present in Boyle’s film.
The thread that is supposed to bring everything together is Ava’s relationship with her husband, which is largely uninteresting and predictable. Despite some third-act revelations, it never escapes feeling like worn-out plot points that have been dealt with in many films and series through the years.
That doesn’t stop Daisy Ridley from giving a good performance. Committed to the role, she plays each familiar beat as if she truly believes it, and once again makes the best of her natural charisma to invite us on her journey, doing what she can to make the stale arc as watchable as possible. She gets some good moments with Thwaites’s Clay, who has some effective moments of his own, and together they smooth over the script’s rough patches.
The one scene that she can’t salvage is a detour with Mark Coles Smith, portraying a grieving man whose pregnant wife was affected by the whole situation. That moment is creepy but quite lengthy and disrupts the film’s rhythm. It reaches a conclusion that feels far too convenient that also raises a lot of questions, which are best if you don’t think about too much.
AFTERTASTE
Through it all, We Bury the Dead offers an effective sense of dread and makes for a solid zombie flick, even if it is not a very interesting character drama. The “deep” psychological moments are not the most engaging, despite Ridley’s dedicated effort to make them land. It reminded me a lot of The Last of Us series, but at least this doesn’t take countless hours to get to the good bits.