The grisly events in Zak Hilditch's zombie survival thriller We Bury the Dead are set in motion by a catastrophic U.S. military weapons test that goes disastrously wrong off the coast of Tasmania. When an experimental electromagnetic pulse weapon malfunctions, nearly half a million people are instantly killed in the resulting shock wave. Rescue forces swarm to the disaster area, where they make a grim discovery: Some of the dead are waking up and growing increasingly violent with each passing day.
Ava Newman (Daisy Ridley) is an American physiotherapist whose husband Mitch (Matt Whelan) was visiting the Australian island on a work retreat when disaster struck. Desperate to find whatever version of Mitch might have survived, Ava travels from America to join a military-led body retrieval unit operating in the quarantine zone. The Australian Army's official position is that the reanimated dead are harmless and slow-moving. But Ava quickly discovers that these undead are far more dangerous than officials admit.
The film's trailer and studio press releases set me up for a Down Under dead-above-grounder with a government conspiracy twist, but We Bury the Dead doesn't deal too much in bureaucratic paranoia. Writer-director Hilditch delivers his zombie hellscape in the form of a small and intimate film that's fleshed out in suburban neighborhoods — living rooms, backyards and garages. Watching these scenes I was repeatedly reminded of the news footage we all saw following sweetly named storms like Katrina, Sandy and Helene, and We Bury the Dead resonates with disaster movies like the Twister franchise as much as the 28 films.
Ava is paired with another unit volunteer named Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a rough-edged, hard-partying local with a dark sense of humor and strong survival instincts. The two of them enter the dusty, smoke-choked landscape to collect bloated corpses from blasted-out homes. They coordinate with other unit members to navigate the army's shoot-on-sight protocols for the reanimated. All the while Ava searches for her husband, plagued by questions about consciousness and identity, and who or what he may become as the exhausting days and nights of digging and dragging tick by.
Hilditch has helmed a handful of comedy and horror features including Netflix projects Rattlesnake (2019) and the Stephen King adaptation 1922 (2017). In a perfect world, We Bury the Dead would win the auteur a bigger audience and better industry support and opportunities. Hilditch and cinematographer Steve Annis deploy slow ominous pans, close-up portraiture and vast, still desert-town landscapes smoldering under poison clouds. Between its monster scares, We Bury the Dead is a slow movie about grief, but its quiet visual beauty, deep soundscape and forward-leaning plot keep every frame engaging. The film delivers chilling sound design, and the propulsive electro score by Clark is one I'll be talking about during next year's awards season. The noises and composed music are all tied together with scene-setting needle-drops from PJ Harvey, Can and Kid Cudi featuring Ratatat.
We Bury the Dead's first zombie reveal registers "Lynchian" on the disturb-o-meter, and there are no weak links in the cast. Even each individual zombie feels unique and actorly thanks to the fantastic minimalist monster makeup work here. The movie opens with a scene from Ava and Mitch's wedding day, and Whelan and Ridley's flashback sequences do a lot of the film's emotional heavy lifting with solid chemistry between the characters. Thwaites is charming as a romantic ruffian, and the actor is up to the task when Hilditch's smart dialog stretches Clay into something more than Biker No. 1. Ridley's fighting final-girl arc evolves naturally in a performance that's seamlessly believable and grounded in true grit. We Bury the Dead is one of those films in which even the incidental characters can steal scenes. The movie's thoroughly excellent performances combine to make its mournfulness feel heavy and its monsters feel real.
We Bury the Dead explores grief, love and unspoken conversations against a backdrop of mounting dread as the dangerous true nature of the outbreak is revealed. It's an undead-monster picture, but Hilditch never lets viewers forget that his monsters are humans. It's a cliché that January can be its own kind of disaster area when it comes to new releases at the movie theater, but this smart, artistic, unique twist on zombie horror is going to have Nashville cinephiles reevaluating the overrated fright films of 2025. The recent horror hit Weapons was fun, but it was a half-baked film. We Bury the Dead is proofed and fully risen.
