We Bury the Dead Review

While the zombie movie refuses to die, it’s certainly not thriving. In the years since the onset of COVID-19, only a handful of films featuring the archetypal monster in one form or another get released every year, and vanishingly few cause a stir. It should come as no surprise that audiences cannot get excited about a genre most often rooted in a widespread outbreak of disease, and whose most enduring images frequently feature empty streets and overflowing hospitals. The only exceptions have been legacy franchises, namely Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, and the ongoing 28 Years Later trilogy (whose next entry is due out in just over a week).

So it was a bold choice for Zak Hilditch to pen an original zombie movie with few big names. Granted, landing one of the most recognizable actresses on the planet as your top-billed star may help to offset people’s general aversion to them. Additionally, We Bury the Dead goes a slightly different route for its inciting incident. A ship belonging to the United States accidentally detonated an experimental weapon off the coast of Tasmania, unleashing an EMP that instantly wiped out the half a million people who populate the island. Only…some of them have been waking up. The military and civilian volunteers tasked with cleaning up the bodies have yet to uncover a pattern to who wakes up and why, but the soldiers are insistent they be immediately killed. Because while they begin docile and vacant despite their horribly mangled flesh, the longer they’re up and about, the more violent they become.

Ava (Daisy Ridley) is an American who’s volunteered to aid with the clean-up in the hopes of finding her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan), who was on a work retreat at the time of the explosion. She never properly got to see him off, and given his all but certain passing, is having an even more difficult time given the lack of closure. That’s the case for almost everyone she meets, most memorably a family of four she finds with their RV. It’s an interesting angle to take in a zombie flick. Instead of positioning these creatures who’ve lost their humanity as fodder upon which our protagonists can enact wanton violence with minimal guilt, their reanimation transforms them into vessels of regret. Sometimes, it manifests in what their remaining loved ones never got to say. In others, it’s about what they were never able to finish while they were amongst the living. Both provide a chance at redemption, no matter how imperfect.

But in January, moviegoers are rarely treated to nice things. Ava quickly acquires a somewhat comedic, mildly unhinged sidekick of sorts in Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a fellow volunteer. Together, they journey far outside the protected zone set up by the military, and towards the disaster site; Mitch should be just south of there. Along the way, they encounter a collection of tired horror tropes, rendered with very little creativity. The genre’s purveyors really need to get together and discuss their collective discomfort with and love of abandoned, dusty gas stations. Ditto for highways strewn with cars, smoke emanating from a disaster site for weeks, and the same exact snarl made by almost every fast zombie since 28 Days Later.

What’s most disappointing is how little confidence writer/director Zak Hilditch has that his audience will be along for the emotional ride. It’s not just the cliches; the plot gets a lot more action heavy once Ava and Clay leave the group. It doesn’t drop its story, but it does cause tonal whiplash when it slows down to emphasize just how desperate everyone is to tie up loose ends, human and zombie alike. In keeping with the need to distract us, Hilditch sets up a handful of subplots and mysteries for us to track and ponder, only for none of them to pay off, save for the least interesting one with the most heavy-handed symbolism. For example, as you’d expect, a Yank at the clean-up for an American-made disaster elicits multiple derisive comments. But despite the pointedness of each interaction, it never matters; Ridley put on an admittedly damn good American accent for nothing.

In her post-Star Wars career, Ridley has proven a very capable genre star with solid taste, elevating films that would otherwise be worthy only of the bargain bin. She’s starred in an off-beat dark dramedy, a taught thriller, and an enjoyably small scale action flick, to name a few. She’s always good, and here is no different, even if her partial effort shows through when her blank expression frustrates your ability to experience Ava’s inner life. But the script is too much of a mess for her to rescue, the dialog too trite, and the character too one-dimensional (grieving widow who wishes she could have one more day with her husband). No one else manages to step up, either, allowing the movie to crumble under its own weight, and barrel towards an eye-roll inducing finale that was done far better last year.

It would be less frustrating if Hilditch allowed us to completely let go of our investment. But there are enough good (or at least intriguing) ideas here to pull you in, making it that much more disappointing that his latest film fails to pull them off.