We Bury the Dead (2025) * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Zak Hilditch

Starring:  Daisy Ridley, Brenton Thwaites, Matt Whelan, Mark Coles Smith

We Bury the Dead contains elements which almost transcend the fact that it is indeed a zombie apocalypse movie.  In this case, it's only confined to Tasmania and not the entire world, but the atmosphere is sufficiently creepy as you would expect.  Despite this, zombies aren't interesting villains and they are picked off like video game targets.   

Daisy Ridley plays Ava, a recently married woman whose husband is traveling on business to Tasmania (of all places) when an electro-magnetic weapon detonates off the coast and instantly kills the island's population.  The living become the dead in milliseconds, and are either frozen in place or just fall to the ground.  Ava comes to the island ostensibly to join crews searching for victims so they could be properly buried, but it turns out some of the dead randomly came back as zombies.  If Ava and her search partner Clay (Thwaites) find a zombie, they are to shoot off a flare which will alert the military to put a bullet in the zombie's head.  What if the troops aren't in the exact area?  A small quibble, but an important one.

Ava decides to light out to the coastal resort hotel where her husband Mitch (Whelan) was staying at the time of the disaster.  Flashbacks reveal marriage troubles caused mostly by Ava's cheating, and part of Ava's journey is hopefully to try and rectify her guilt in some way, even though Mitch is likely dead or at best zombified.  On the way, her life is saved by a military officer (Smith) who has secrets of his own, including a zombie pregnant wife.  Ava's marriage problems began with their disagreement over having children.  You can easily put two and two together.

The performances work, with Ridley providing enough gravitas for us to understand that there will be no happy ending for her as far as Mitch is concerned.  She is grieving and guilty, with Ridley giving us room to sympathize.  With all of this said, We Bury the Dead is a near-miss, mostly because we've seen plenty of movies (as recently as 28 Years Later) in which zombies lumber towards the heroes and have their heads blown off.  Zombie movies have been action movies, heavy dramas, and even comedies, but the end result for the zombies is the same.