Director: Zak Hilditch
Writer: Zak Hilditch
Stars: Daisy Ridley, Mark Coles Smith, Brenton Thwaites
Synopsis: After a catastrophic military disaster, the dead don’t just rise – they hunt. Ava searches for her missing husband, but what she finds is far more terrifying.
When taking a dip into the world of Zombies in all sorts of media, it’s hard to pin down what hasn’t been tackled. The fast-paced chaos of films like World War Z and the never-ending saga of The Walking Dead have felt overplayed to the point where the genre’s main interest lies in new territory of experimentation. Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland brought a new dose of comedy to the genre, while films like 28 Years Later have uprooted the core themes of what can happen in a zombie picture. Zak Hilditch’s We Bury The Dead plays between the familiar and unique aspects of the undead. There are a few jump scares and tense chases to be found, but the film opts for a more somber mood piece, building an atmosphere of still quietness amidst a desolate landscape and exploring themes of closure in life amidst the wake of a horrible tragedy. Some will be thrown off by the central focus on vibes and mood over kinetic action sequences, but We Bury The Dead brings more than enough grim theming to its filmmaking and story beats that result in one of the more creative uses of the Zombie canon in recent memory, even in the face of some cliched window dressing.
We start following Ava (Daisy Ridley), who lives a happy life with her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan). However, Ava seemingly loses her husband to a disastrous military experiment in Tasmania, where the sitting US president fired an explosive device. Some people, of course, died from the catastrophe, while others still have a bit of kick in them post the shock wave and are starting to rise from death. Hoping her husband could be one of the undead, Ava sets out to join the body retrieval unit in Tasmania and breaks off with her assigned partner, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), in the hopes of finding Mitch while avoiding the continued hostility of the undead.
Even without addressing the deeper themes at play within its scenes, Hilditch quickly cements an impactful atmosphere of foreboding darkness from the get-go. The film’s shot composition uses a large array of wide shots and pans to capture nearly every frame of emptiness amidst an abandoned landscape. The landscape of smoke, flames, and desolate bodies only makes the sudden appearances of the jittery deceased all the more frightening. The way the zombies are showcased physically is also impactful in and of itself; I love the film honing in on the eerie sounds and blankness that these undead bring to the zombie forefront while choosing to use loud and fast jump scares sparingly. By the time the credits of We Bury the Dead roll, all you’ll be hearing is the bone-chilling grinding of the undead’s teeth.
The most poignant aspect of We Bury the Dead lies in what the film has to say about the regrets that arise from things that had yet to be spoken in the midst of unexpected tragedy. Yes, countless horror films have droned on about grief and trauma-related topics within their stories, but Hilditch brings a somber realism to it that reflects our own real-life experiences strikingly. The melancholic theming is only bolstered by yet another fantastic showcase from Daisy Ridley, who is able to both convey these complex emotions and sell gory zombie beatdowns in equal measure.
There’s plenty of great physicality to her performance here, especially as the film enters lonely walks with her amidst the desolate landscape towards its latter half, but she delivers on conveying the pain of having no closure with Mitch after the bump in their relationship that caused him to leave for Tasmania in the first place. We all have been in a similar place of longing to say something to someone we deeply miss, and this thread radiates off each major character in this film, and even the more sentient zombies themselves, in standout scenes. There isn’t anything necessarily brand new thematically that’s being brought to the forefront here, but it’s a welcome change of pace to a sub-genre that has been so worn out.
We Bury the Dead may leave some wanting more of the bloody brutality that would be expected from most other zombie flicks, but it brings an appreciated somber mood to its presence, and tackles themes of closure within global tragedy that make it one of the freshest zombie pictures in a bit. It can suffer on occasion from cliches, and not all of its dramatic swings work, but it’s a solidly executed zombie flick from Hilditch on the whole.
