We Bury the Dead Review: Clinging to Life

For each of its zombie genre innovations, We Bury the Dead is too hamstrung by its conventions, and becomes too meditative to excite.

We learn early on that the United States accidentally released an experimental weapon which instantly killed the inhabitants of Tasmania. Thus enters Ava (Ridley), an American who heads there shortly after, volunteering as part of the Body Retrieval Unit as a thinly-veiled attempt to find her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan), who happened to be in the region for work. Some, but not all, of the dead have been known to come back to life, and the military assists with taking out those that do. Ava is teamed up with Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a hard-talking Aussie who’d rather smash heads than talk about his reasons for being there.

At the very least, We Bury the Dead works as an effective portrait of a place ruined by disaster, and how it can be so hard to move on from it. The Australian countryside can often be depicted as wistful, even idyllic, in its vastness, but here it’s effectively haunting. Hilditch uses the first act to show a number of locations, from a simple home to a strip club, and how Ava – a physical therapist by trade – reacts to the horrific new reality.

One particularly memorable moment comes at her first encounter with a reanimated corpse, which is as profound as it should be. She’s seeing something that she’s never seen before, and she doesn’t know how to fully process it. Ridley, who’s successfully managed to step out of the Star Wars-sized shadow which dominated her early career, does everything the film asks of her, even when her character is too thinly written.

Through flashbacks, we learn that Ava and Mitch had troubles conceiving, and this distance could have pushed him across the world and into their current predicament. But this revelation never really feels essential to understanding Ava, or her motivation for risking her life in Tasmania. Rather, it mostly feels like We Bury the Dead needed some extra padding for an already loosely sketched character. After Ava and Clay steal a motorcycle as a way to break through the military’s blockade – the coastline, where Mitch was last, is where more destructive zombies can be found – we learn that corpses come back to life because they have unfinished business.

Zombie, and post-apocalyptic, fiction is built on the foundation of exploring humanity, and how it carries on once societal norms begin to fall. Do we continue to do the right thing once nobody’s watching, or do we give in to our basest impulses for violence and chaos? Hilditch deserves credit for not filling We Bury the Dead with zombies driven by eating brains, and for limiting the film’s scope to one island – not the entire world – but the plot hews a little too closely to the same beats from more familiar movies.

Clay eventually goes off on his own, leaving Ava with Riley (Mark Coles Smith), a rogue military man grieving his wife and unborn child. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s ever seen a survival horror film when the previously relatable and comforting Riley eventually reveals himself to be a lunatic, and Ava is once again on her own.

While not subverting expectations at every turn, We Bury the Dead still has its positive, inspiring moments. Ridley’s presence does a great deal to elevate Hilditch’s material, and the production value is indeed impressive for a low-budget genre film. The zombies notably do not groan or screech but grind their teeth together – a sound which is almost more unnerving than seeing their heads bashed in or decapitated in one way or another. Unfortunately, whenever some new innovation comes along, something more reductive shuffles in to steal its thunder.

We Bury the Dead will be released in US theatres on January 2, 2025.