Woman holding axe in WE BURY THE DEAD (2025) horror film

The history of the zombie sub-genre is one of deep thematic potential. Whilst sometimes it’s undoubtedly fun to enjoy a good headshot or effective practical makeup effects, the best zombie movies are the ones that say something. It is also zombies that feel the most uniquely positioned to deal with anxieties that have arisen because of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly those relating to disease, and dealing with widespread and sudden death. This closure is the focus of We Bury the Dead, the latest film from Zak Hilditch.

An experimental weapon is mistakenly deployed by the United States military off the coast of Tasmania, killing half a million people. The cleanup of the dead is now in progress and volunteers are being shipped in to help with the effort. But there are rumours of an unusual development: some of the dead are waking up. Amongst the volunteers is Ava (Daisy Ridley) an American woman who has joined in hopes of finding her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan). She enlists the assistance of loner Clay (Brenton Thwaites) to help her sneak away from the operation and get to the resort where her husband was staying. But it’s more than just the distance and a burning city standing in their way.

It's always nice to see a zombie narrative that isn’t focused on America. If anything, making America the cause of what has happened adds an uncomfortable air of hostility towards our protagonist Ava. Steve Annis’ cinematography makes the most of the beautiful Western Australian scenery where the film was shot. In emphasising the vast spaces, the characters seem so small, and isolated. The flipside of that is the more domestic landscapes. The suburban streets with bodies lined up outside houses for cataloguing, and the smoke-choked city with vague figures visible. Both speak of the devastation and are evocative of real-life disaster situations. The body disposal is a grim process, as we see people who have dropped where they were in the middle of their regular life and must now be dragged out, and disposed of with little dignity. Some of Ava’s fellow volunteers can’t stomach what is happening, while others spend the down time partying in defiance of the death that their work is filled with.

The first glimpse of the depictions of these zombies is wonderfully eerie, and off-putting. There is no virus, no flesh eating, no threat of the dead swelling to greater numbers through bites or infection. The horror of them is just the sheer deep-seated wrongness of watching something that you know is dead moving around. Whilst the returned become more agitated as time passes, the danger is only comparable to a regular, albeit rabid, person. Overall, they are mostly sad, pitiable, things that have moments which remind you that these were once people, and part of them still might be.

The seemingly random nature of who does and does not "wake up" adds another layer of cruelty to the situation. To lose someone and be presented with a slim possibility that they may still be alive in some form, only to face either the reality of what that resurrection means, or absolute confirmation of their demise. Both are a bitter pill, but closure in the face of death often is.

Daisy Ridley as an actress has a style that works very well – appearing stoic on top but with a lot going on underneath. That is Ava in a nutshell; a woman who is holding everything together for the possibility of finding out what happened to her husband. You find yourself waiting for the inevitable moment when the emotional dam breaks. Brenton Thwaites’ Clay is more a facilitator for Ava’s journey but still gets some solid character moments. The third hand of the main cast is Mark Coles Smith as Riley; a soldier whose personal story is a mirror of Ava’s own.

Overall, it’s a simple story. But it’s well-told, and the low-scale focus on survival amidst a wider disaster punctuated by moments of tension really drives home the emotion.

But then it keeps going.

Something happens at the end of We Bury the Dead. You can understand the reason for this decision and how it fits into the rest of the story, but it's just so obvious and cheap that it sours everything good that came before it. It’s a fumble at the final hurdle that keeps this from being an interesting little film that comes at the (over)familiar zombie genre from a new angle.

We Bury the Dead is currently available to watch in theaters in the United States, on Digital 2 February, and Blu-ray & DVD 16 February.