‘We Bury the Dead’ Review: A Zombie Film That’s Most Alive in Its Quietest Moments

I always get a bit uneasy around zombie movies that seem to relish killing zombies. There are exceptions like “Zombieland,” but too often the genre feels completely indifferent to the idea that the undead used to be people. Instead, they only exist as enemies to be slaughtered, the only difference between them and other faceless foes, like aliens or robots, being that zombies are human-shaped. Thankfully, “We Bury the Dead” is a movie that leans into the sense of loss and grief that zombies can represent. Neither living nor dead, they serve as useful symbols for a lack of closure that can create a gnawing anguish. There are some moments where the film clings a bit too heavily to genre tropes, but thankfully, its main focus is on coping with loss and the complexity of grief.

In “We Bury the Dead,” the U.S. has accidentally detonated a biological weapon off the coast of Tasmania, instantly killing roughly 500,000 people. Volunteers from the mainland have volunteered to help with the disposal of the bodies. Among the volunteers is Ava (Daisy Ridley), a young woman whose husband was at a business retreat on the island, and while she doesn’t hold out much hope for his survival, she still feels compelled to find his body.

The minor twist with this catastrophe is that some of the dead are, to borrow the phrase of the Australian military in the movie, “coming back online.” When this happens, volunteers are supposed to alert soldiers, who will shoot the undead in the head. Because the resort is much further south than her assignment, Ava, with the help of the roguish Clay (Brenton Thwaites), breaks off from the group to find what happened to her husband.

From its early scenes, director Zak Hilditch makes it clear he’s not trying to push his zombie movie towards thrills or even a spreading infection. If anything, he’s trying to reestablish the weight of grief and the shared humanity we feel in the face of tragedy. The recovery efforts are marked by some volunteers quickly tapping out, unable to move dead bodies because they’ve likely never been around a corpse before, and almost certainly not the corpses of children, who are among the deceased. Hilditch leans into this fascinating conflict of how we deal with death, attempting to be pragmatic and cold while also wrestling with the severe emotional cost. There are those who, when confronted with death, can handle it as just another part of life, and there are those who immediately vomit upon the sight of a decaying body. Both reactions can be normal, and that normalcy in the face of the supernatural premise is what gives “We Bury the Dead” its pulse.

Ridley holds the center of the film well, leaning into Ava’s quiet reserve and her practicality, as she seeks to make things right in a way that can never be fully fixed. The film periodically provides flashbacks to her marriage, showing how what started as a picture-perfect wedding devolved into fights and recriminations. Thwaites makes for a serviceable foil, providing Clay with a breezy indifference that keeps us, like Ava, wondering if this is a guy who can be trusted, or if he’s just trying to get in her pants. As their relationship grows over the course of the story, their bond feels earned rather than forced for convenience.

The film’s biggest stumbling block arrives around the midpoint when the movie resorts to the familiar trope of “Avoid the Dead, Beware the Living.” Crossing paths with a soldier (Mark Coles Smith) wrestling with his own deep-seated grief does provide a useful thematic point about how loss can create its own kind of sickness and decay. The film fully invests in the idea about closure being something that’s just not nice to have, but necessary if we’re to consider a future different than the one we imagined. Unfortunately, the shape of these scenes feels not just overly familiar to the genre but also jarring given the somber tone of what came before. Hilditch knows how to make his zombies unnerving (they do a teeth-grinding thing that’s particularly disquieting) but his attempts to ramp up the intensity only detract from the human drama that came before.

Thankfully, the movie mostly manages to return to its quieter tone in its final third, and from there it achieves the distinct thematic arc it was going for within the shape of the zombie genre. Reminiscent of “28 Years Later,” “We Bury the Dead” uses zombies as a good launching point for an elegiac story of love and loss. There are plenty of other options for the bloody dismemberment and “aim for the head” violence the genre provides, but “We Bury the Dead” wisely veers off the beaten path to find a richer story rather than trying to reanimate the kind of zombie movie we’ve seen countless times before.

“We Bury the Dead” hits theaters January 2.

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