We Bury the Dead
"We Bury the Dead" shambles past genre expectations opting for grief and guilt over gore.
I’m a sucker for a zombie flick, but to be honest, usually if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. You’re just hoping for a little novelty that might separate it from the pack. A twist or an idea that shows the filmmakers weren’t just hoping to cash in on the genre and its dedicated following.
So when Zak Hilditch’s “We Bury the Dead” showed up, I wanted to review it more to check out Daisy Ridley’s performance than anything else. I mean, it’s just another zombie flick, right?
I’m happy to say I was wrong.
Rather than the typical zombie-survival story, we get a deeply human tale of a young woman searching for her husband after a botched military exercise, one that’s far more emotionally grounded than I expected, and I loved it.
“We Bury the Dead” isn’t a horror movie in the conventional sense. Sure, there are teeth-grinding/chattering zombies, some nice bloody moments and a sense of dread, but this is a story powered more by guilt than by love.
After a U.S. military weapon experiment goes wrong and wipes out most of the living creatures in Tasmania, about 500,000 in total, volunteers are sought to help retrieve the bodies. There’s only one little problem: some of them are “coming back online,” and as time passes, they’re becoming more agitated and violent.
Ava (Ridley) volunteers in hopes of making her way to southern Tasmania to find her husband, who was attending a business retreat at the time of the disaster. We get snapshots of the happy couple, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear there were problems in their relationship. Infidelity is hinted at as well as a miscarriage. But Ava is driven to find her husband by any means necessary.
When her first partner bails after the first body retrieval, Ava teams up with Clay (Brenton Thwaites). During one retrieval, they encounter their first person who comes back. Instead of coming after them, it hides in the shadows, almost more afraid of them than they are of it. In quick order, the soldiers arrive and take the person offline for good.
It’s a strained partnership at first, but when Ava lays out her plan to find her husband, Clay is more than willing to help. Not out of a sense of chivalry, but of just having a damn good time giving the military the middle finger. They steal a motorcycle, head south and along the way come face-to-face with something much more frightening than the undead.
Nearing the end of their journey, the duo is attacked by one of the undead, but a soldier named Riley (Mark Coles Smith) saves the day. He’s more understanding than the rest, but Ava finds herself alone when Clay disappears during their encounter with Riley. The soldier agrees to help her on her journey after revealing he lost his wife, who was expecting their first child.
What initially seems like a lifeline Ava desperately needs, quickly turns into something far more unsettling. We find that Riley’s grief has taken over in a disturbing way, forcing Ava to confront a threat far more terrifying than the undead themselves. Able to escape Riley, she continues her journey alone.
Once she arrives at the resort, her search ends when she finds her husband, Mitch (Matt Whelan), and is able to let him go. Her trek was driven by equal parts of love and guilt. Clay reemerges, revealing he fled in hopes of helping her and is there to support Ava as she delivers her final goodbye to her husband, but not before sharing one last, reckless night with Clay. On their way back north, they encounter Riley’s pregnant wife in the road and Hilditch delivers an ending that is so wickedly cool it’s hard not to love it.
“We Bury the Dead” plays much like an indie film, bucking the conventional wisdom of what a zombie flick ought to be and opting instead for a story that’s more substance than scary. The film is a slow burn from the opening credits, but I’m glad Hilditch took his time with the story and lets Ridley show off her range once again. Ridley’s given some fantastic performances in the past few years and it’s frustrating that she doesn’t get the credit she deserves.
Thwaites is equally as good as Clay and his effortless charisma will easily win over audiences. For me, though, one performance I can’t go without highlighting is Kingsley Judd as Camper Van Dad. He’s on screen for maybe 20 seconds and delivers a hauntingly heartbreaking performance that ripped my heart out.
As far as zombie flicks go, “We Bury the Dead” is one of my favorites thanks to Hilditch’s willingness to tell a story driven more by honesty than horror, showing that the true terror in life can be the guilt we carry.