It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Filmed in 2024 but not getting a wide release until 2026, We Bury the Dead is an Australian zombie movie written and directed by Zak Hilditch and starring Daisy Ridley and Brenton Thwaites. The plot is relatively simple, focusing on the lengths some people will go to achieve closure. Ridley plays Ava, an American who has volunteered to help in the massive project of retrieving and disposing of bodies in Tasmania after a botched US weapons test sends an electromagnetic pulse through the country that kills every living being.
Every living being, human and animal.
Well, actually it renders everyone brain dead (although those closer to the original test location seem to have been devastated in what looked like a nuclear blast). It turns out that some of the “dead” are regaining motor functions, and the Australian military has orders to dispose of the reanimated corpses with respect – which means with a gunshot to the brain.
Ava has volunteered to help because her husband was on a training retreat in Southern Tasmania when the test went off and she is desperate to find him, reanimated or not, to have some emotional closure after they parted on bad terms. After her first partner backs out, unable to take the emotional toll of bringing out the dead, Ava is paired with rough and tumble builder Clay (Thwaites), and it doesn’t take long for her to convince him to make an unauthorized jaunt 200 miles south into a restricted area to find her husband.
Through flashbacks we learn that Ava and her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan) had grown distant after issues with having a child. That’s the main motivator for Ava to try to find Mitch’s corpse so she can find some sort of emotional closure after their awkward parting.
In the process of making this trip, Ava and Clay are intercepted by a lone soldier named Riley (Mark Coles Smith), who, as one would expect, is not right in the head. That’s not a spoiler, by the way. It’s obvious from the moment he enters the film. I will avoid any more spoilers for this section, as it has a few rather fucked up moments before we get to our grand finale at the Woodbridge resort hotel.
We Bury the Dead is beautifully filmed and acted, with cinematography by Steve Annis, who also worked on Color Out of Space and Foundation. The visual effects are also solid, with a decidedly nasty interpretation of the undead that is enhanced by particularly unnerving teeth-grinding effects. The internal logic of the film is a little confusing though, as we learn that initially, the reanimated corpses are docile and slow-moving and grow more agitated and aggressive the longer they’re awake.
But not always, depending on the emotional impact Hilditch wants to draw out of the scene. Sometimes they are shambling, sometimes they are sprinters, sometimes they want to murder you, sometimes they want to bury their un-reanimated families. With the late reveal that it was conception problems that caused the split between Ava and Mitch, the closing scene is a bit heavy-handed, if not just a little silly.
Overall, We Bury the Dead is well-made with nice performances and a strong emotional core but is kind of slow and forgettable. It’s worth a watch, but I wouldn’t add it to my collection.