It’s bad form to criticize a movie for what it isn’t rather than engaging with what it actually is, but writer/director Zak Hilditch makes it incredibly difficult to separate his We Bury the Dead from the avalanche of zombie apocalypse stories that have littered screens both big and small for the past decade-plus. It doesn’t help that the film is coming mere months after Danny Boyle’s exquisite 28 Years Later, only a few weeks before that film’s sequel, The Bone Temple, and is releasing almost simultaneously with Greenland 2, another somber exploration of loss and grief mixed with scattered genre thrills. The point is, Hilditch is working with extremely familiar, well-trod material, and while the film can’t fully escape viewers’ long-standing intimacy with this sort of stuff, it does at least manage to muster its own modest virtues.
One of those virtues is a welcome narrative conciseness. The film begins with a quick, no-frills introduction to its apocalyptic scenario: an American weapons test has gone horribly awry, and a massive explosion wipes out the island of Tasmania, killing 500,000 people in an instant. Ava (Daisy Ridley) has joined a group of volunteers that will travel to the island to catalogue, identify, and dispose of the dead. But she has an ulterior motive; Ava’s husband, Mitch (Matt Whelan), was on a trip to Woodbridge, some hours south of Hibart, and she hopes to get away from the mission and find him. There are reports, quickly confirmed by the group’s military escorts, that some of the dead have reanimated, although no one knows why. They assure the volunteers that it is a side effect of the weapon, that the people are still in fact medically dead, and pose no threat. If one is spotted, then, the group is instructed to flag down military personnel, who will quickly and “humanely” dispatch of the walking corpses.
The film’s first act sees Ava and an assigned partner, the gung-ho, wannabe tough guy Riley (Mark Coles Smith), entering homes and removing bodies. It’s an eerie, mostly quiet series of events, with some volunteers getting sick and quitting, and others breaking down at the sight of so much death. Eventually, the volunteers retire to an empty building complex to eat, sleep, and let off steam. Ava takes this opportunity to sneak away from the group, eventually convincing Riley to travel with her to the south of the island into a forbidden zone that the military has not cleared yet. And so We Bury the Dead segues at this point into a sort of depressed road trip, as the duo traverse barren, abandoned stretches of highway and rural backroads. They have occasional encounters with both roving military squads and the undead, some of whom are becoming faster and more aggressive the longer they stay reanimated. Eventually, Ava and Riley are attacked by a zombie they can’t handle, but are saved by a lone soldier who informs them that they are not authorized to travel away from the recovery group. He separates them and kicks them up, but rather than alerting more authorities, he seems to have something much more serious in mind for Ava. It’s an odd but creepy narrative pivot, essentially a short film placed in the middle of a larger story, but it gets at Hildith’s larger point here — that grief does strange things to people, and everyone has to cope in different ways.
We Bury the Dead is an extremely quiet, self-contained film, “small” in interesting ways, especially for this subgenre. The flip side of this is that because the proceedings are so extremely solemn, the very occasional zombie attack can feel like a rude interruption to an otherwise placid surface. But Ridley serves to anchor things with a controlled, focused performance, and her own stern facade finally drops when she reaches her final destination and the film reveals the roots of her compulsive need to seek closure. Guilt and grief commingle in volatile ways, and if We Bury the Dead never really kicks into a second gear, Hilditch carefully maintains a mood of general unease throughout. Working with cinematographer Steve Annis, they construct a multitude of overhead aerial shots that turn roads into sharp straight lines that cut through the widescreen frame. It’s very carefully composed, making the rare outburst of frenzied running all the more impactful. We Bury the Dead isn’t any sort of new masterpiece of the genre, but it’s good enough to recommend to to those looking for an offbeat, surprising mood piece.
DIRECTOR: Zak Hilditch; CAST: Daisy Ridley, Brenton Thwaites, Matt Whelan, Mark Coles Smith; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN THEATERSL January 2, 2026; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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