We Bury the Dead
**Seen at the 2025 Atlanta Film Festival
This movie haunted me. We’ve seen zombie movies before where the focus is less on zombie action and more on the dynamics between characters, as the modern zombie film has always been one rich in social commentary, but few have really focused more on the characters still living. In Zak Hilditch’s film, the zombies are a footnote to the larger state of the world he creates. This is a film about the people left behind, and it is one I’m going to have a hard time shaking.
“We Bury the Dead” begins, before the story proper, with an experimental explosion by the United States off the coast of the island of Tasmania. We do not know what was a part of the explosion beyond it not seeming to be nuclear, but we do know the immediate blast radius is still on fire, and that everyone on the island was killed. The Australian government is bringing people in to retrieve bodies, and that is how Ava (Daisy Ridley) is making it onto the island. Here real reason for coming, however, is that her husband, Mitch, was on the island near the initial blast radius, and she wants to make her way down there. There are rumors, we are told, that some of the victims are coming back to life as brain dead beings. As we see in flashbacks throughout the film, Ava and Mitch had a lush wedding, but their marriage might have been rougher.
I love journey movies. Yes, every movie should be taking us on a journey, but I’m talking specifically about movies where the journey for the characters is as much as spiritual one as a physical one. For me, the gold standard is Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” where three men go into a mysterious Zone in hopes of finding a room where all their wishes would come true. Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” is another rich one, and I would not be surprised if people find themselves thinking of that one a lot as they watch “We Bury the Dead.” This is another example in the festival where a title gives off a horrific sense of dread in the film, but the film is much quieter than it implies. (The other one is “The World Drops Dead.) The title is apt, though, especially when Ava meets two men who will join her on her journey in one capacity or another- Clay (Brenton Thwaites), her partner in body retrieval, and Riley (Mark Coles Smith), an military officer also looking for closure after the death of his wife in the blast. That is the ultimate idea behind this film- it’s about closure, and seeing Ava’s determination to achieve it (including facing the zombie version of Mitch, if needed) makes us follow completely with her journey.
Daisy Ridley has been asserting herself as a compelling screen presence since the sequel trilogy, but the past few years have given her some great variety in films to do that. Last year we had the quiet, introspective work she did in “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” as well as the determined heroism of “Young Woman and the Sea.” Here, we are back to introspection, but we also see some great action work from her, which is aided by how Hilditch shoots the action. Sometimes, he is aiming for something more ponderous as they are on the road, and in one sequence, he very much goes for cliched suspense filmmaking. In one sequence, though, he’s aiming for inventiveness that is successful because of how the film has followed Ava all the way through. As she makes it to the end of her journey, there are a few more surprises in store, which I will not spoil here. All I will say is Hilditch is building out quite a remarkable world in this film.
