We Bury the Dead review – Daisy Ridley takes on the undead in a powerful zombie twist | Horror movies

ShUnlike some other, less malleable horror subgenres, the zombie movie will never truly die. And the filmmakers won’t try to add their own twist, which is understandable given how repetitive the die, wake, wood, bite, repeat formula has become. Australian director Zak Hilditch’s somewhat subdued attempt, We Bury the Dead, is not quite as striking as it seemed a decade ago and changed a decade ago. Using words like “meditative” and “sad” to describe a movie that includes its fair share of violent head-smashing has become such a cliché that last month’s reboot of the comedy “Anaconda” had its characters laughing, saying that these days, even a movie about a giant snake needs “generational shock” to succeed.

But Hilditch thankfully avoids drowning his film in dull self-seriousness. Yes, it’s a zombie survival thriller that’s also about sadness – but it’s also just a zombie survival thriller, albeit with less carnage than some might expect. Those preparing for gore would be forgiven for anticipating so given the film’s cursed January 2 release date, which is typically handed to the studio’s silliest horror films, from One Missed Call to Texas Chainsaw 3D to Season of the Witch (they’ll probably get their fill of next week’s killer chimpanzee Schlocker Primate instead). We Bury the Dead, which was partly funded by the Adelaide Film Festival ahead of its premiere at SXSW, focuses less on the death toll and more on the death toll of someone lost, in this iteration the result of a US government blunder.

In a turn of events that doesn’t seem so far-fetched given the clown show that is Trump’s army, a catastrophic incident involving a weapon of mass destruction has killed nearly half a million people in Tasmania. One of these is Ava’s traveling husband (Daisy Ridley), who has now traveled to join a team of volunteers to help recover bodies, enter the homes of the dead and assist with identification and cataloging. But she’s really hoping to break away from the herd and find his body, abandoned in an out-of-bounds area where fires still burn. Her presence is not very popular given the number of Australians who still blame the Americans (Ridley’s accent takes a while to even out) but she finds a friend in rule-breaker Clay (Brenton Thwaites), who agrees to go with her into uncharted territory. Oh, there’s a slight snag: some of the dead are starting to wake up…

It is unclear why this happens or why some bodies begin to tremble while others remain still, which may explain why there is no noticeable fear on screen. The undead are treated as a sort of curiosity, as if no one in this universe has ever seen a zombie movie before, and only when the “excitement” occurs during the later stages of the transformation does anyone start running and grabbing something pointy. Instead, Ridley’s Ava is more focused on the horror of what she’s lost, her big eyes always on the verge of tears, and whether finding her husband’s body will help bring closure in any way. What if he’s awake? Would that be better or worse?

Coming off her Star Wars duties, it’s probably for the best that Ridley’s traditional attempt at being a multiplex mainstay didn’t work out so well. I stumbled away from the cursed YA chaos of Chaos Walking and found more enjoyment in smaller fare instead. She was wonderfully defined in her portrayal of an anxious office worker in the Sundance comedy Sometimes I Think About Dying, was virtually unsettled in the little-seen 2024 British thriller Magpie (a film with a brilliantly sinister finish) and now she’s great on a smaller canvas again. She gives real emotional depth to her underwritten protagonist, as she navigates a frightening world while processing a terrifying truth – that the person she gave her life to will never return. She’s as effectively strong with her body as things go wrong in conveying the horror of grief, a character light on dialogue that relies on Ridley’s impressively modulated facial reactions.

She works hard to engage us in her quest, although our interest begins to wane a bit in the final act. Hilditch, who gave us a good Netflix horror film (1922) and a truly terrible one (Rattlesnake), is more confident in the visuals, capturing the beauty of the landscape with some truly stunning shots and stretching his budget to make a small film that often feels grand, even more so than it does with tone. There are some substitutions that work (there’s a scene involving a sad soldier and an unusual dance that moves neatly from sadness to suspense) but a lot of them don’t, quiet moments of contemplation followed by “fun” scenes or mid-range zombie antics with large needle audio recording.

As Ava’s journey comes to a close, we realize that there’s not much here that’s all that new when it comes to the walking dead and how humans will truly deal with their existence (a fact made all the more apparent by a disappointing finale that asks a question that was already asked last year 28 years later). But in this genre that suffers from a lack of effort, I’ll give it a solid try.