In Review: ‘We Bury the Dead’

We Bury the Dead
Dir. Zak Hilditch
94 min.

Never mind the debate about slow zombies versus fast zombies: what about sad zombies? If three movies make a trend, we’re there. Following in the (halting) footsteps of the 2024 Norwegian film Handling the Undead and the elegiac 28 Years Later, We Bury the Dead depicts Tasmania in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event that’s left a good portion of its population dead (or, because it’s a zombie movie, sort of dead) in a place of unrelenting bleakness and loss. Which makes a lot of sense, when you think about it. A lot of zombie movies get so caught up in the business of survival—fast or slow, the undead can be formidable foes—they seem to forget that all those shambling corpses used to be somebody’s loved ones. They might be mindless ghouls but someone somewhere is probably missing them.

They might not even be entirely mindless or ghoulish, as in this new film from writer and director Zak Hilditch (1922). As We Bury the Dead opens, the accidental detonation of an experimental American weapon has wiped out all living things in the Tasmanian capital of Hobart and points beyond its immediate vicinity. It’s a grim situation that’s compelled the government of Australia to call for volunteers to fly in to help dispose of the corpses. The call has been answered by, among other brave souls, Ava (Daisy Ridley), an American whose husband Mitch (Matt Whelan) has disappeared while attending a business retreat at a resort in the south of the state. Is it far enough away from ground zero that he might have survived? Probably not, but Ava has to know. So she dutifully goes from house to house looking for the dead as she waits for an opportunity to break away. It’s a dangerous plan made even more perilous by an unexpected development: some of the dead have come back to life.

Well, sort of. The zombies of We Bury the Dead are docile, at least at first. They’re also less the film’s driving force than a key feature of a landscape that reminds Ava of how much she’s lost as she reflects and regrets while making her way toward her destination, helped for much of the journey by Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a free-spirited and reckless fellow volunteer. As a horror movie, We Bury the Dead is light on scares (and has a little trouble sustaining momentum in its back half), despite some truly upsetting zombies. But Hilditch’s film works extremely well as a mournful mood piece anchored by Ridley’s  thoughtful, melancholy performance as a woman trying to understand the fullness of her loss and the impossibility of recovering the past. It’s a mourning process that plays out as she traverses Pompeii-like scenes of corpses frozen at the moments of their unexpected deaths (with a few who aren’t frozen scattered in their midst) and an already barren countryside now haunted by the disappearance of the few who lived there and those they’ve left behind to try to make sense of it all. —Keith Phipps

We Bury the Dead shambles into theaters on January 1st. (Also, Happy New Year!)