Whilst visually impressive, Marco Dutra’s Bury Your Dead gets lost in a muddle of big ideas, unexplained details, and scattered storytelling and worldbuilding.
Director: Marco Dutra
Genre: Apocalyptic, Horror, Drama
Run Time: 128′
BFI London Film Festival Screening: October 11-13, 2024
U.S. Release Date: TBA
U.K. Release Date: TBA
Where did this weird religious cult come from? Why are people being stuffed and displayed in glass cases? What is The Syndrome? Why are chickens and rocks shot into the sky from canons at particular times everyday? These are just a few of the questions Bury Your Dead (Enterre Seus Mortos) hurls at you across its runtime, and pretty much none of them are answered.
Ambiguity is no bad thing in a film, but in Bury Your Dead, it just feels like laziness on the part of director Marco Dutra (Good Manners) and his co-writer Ana Paula Maia (Unsoul) not to at least explain anything in real detail. The result is an initially fascinating and darkly humourous film that quickly descends into something mundane and messy.
Bury Your Dead is set in an apocalyptic near-future, where some sort of illness (the aforementioned Syndrome) has afflicted children and animals. Quite what this means isn’t clear—the children live on the aptly named Isolation Islands, whilst animals just seem to die—but the result on society is unsurprisingly terrifying. Adults who can’t afford to leave the planet live on in poverty and crime, either within the Capital City or its outskirts, such as the remote town where Bury Your Dead takes place. Two people left behind here are roadkill collectors Edgar Wilson (Selton Mello, I’m Still Here) and Tomás (Danilo Grangheia, Brotherhood). The latter is an excommunicated priest, and the former is plagued by childhood trauma and regular nightmares and sleepwalking.
Just as in Good Manners, Dutra conducts proceedings with a playful, unique, and often gory surrealism. Horror elements accompany domestic dramas in a world that might be futuristic, but still feels like our own. The first issues arise here: the worldbuilding in Bury Your Dead is so vague that it feels fake, despite the obvious similarities to our real world. Dutra’s attempted commentaries on religious fanaticism and societal inequalities have been done better not just in modern Brazilian films such as Medusa (2021) or Bacurau (2019), but in many worldwide recent releases too.
Initially, Bury Your Dead is engaging and intriguing. There is even something magical about its randomness and unpredictability, but over the course of its runtime, this gives way to a mess of ideas, as if Dutra chucked lots of ideas into a pot and saw what quirks came out. His inability to create a cohesive world or story means any early sense of creativity is lost. As random plots and details come and go with no narrative sense, this apocalyptic journey becomes deeply tiresome, especially considering the film’s unwarranted two hour plus runtime.
Bury Your Dead is visually impressive and boasts strong production values, which makes its weak, scattered storytelling that much more frustrating. There is some excellent imagery and impressive use of colours in here; certain scenes are shot in imaginative ways, intelligently blocking and filming what could normally be standard dialogue. These elements give a strong basis for some tangible worldbuilding, but the details end up either missing or randomly assigned. This hit-and-miss nature bleeds into the horror elements of Bury Your Dead too: some are strong and haunting in their gore, whilst others feel as clunky and as shockingly fake as they did in Good Manners. When Bury Your Dead reaches its weird but somewhat memorable conclusion, it has become so lost in its own steam that even some more strong imagery isn’t enough to save the film.
Bury Your Dead will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 11-13, 2024. Read our list of 30 movies to watch at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival!
