We Bury the Dead review: Daisy Ridley excels in unexpected zombie movie
When you think of a zombie movie, you have certain expectations in your head. There have been so many, how could you not have some preconceived ideas? With We Bury the Dead, Australian filmmakerZak Hilditch tries to do something different and delivers an emotional drama with some zombies in it.
The story follows Ava (Daisy Ridley), an American woman who flies to the Australian island of Tasmania after the U.S. military accidentally deploys an experimental weapon, sending an electromagnetic pulse across the island, wiping out the entire population of 500,000 in an instant. She volunteers in the body retrieval team, thinking it’s the best way to look for her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan), and absconds from her duty with her volunteering partner, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), to travel south to the retreat where Mitch was staying for work. The only hitch – some of the dead are starting to wake back up.
We Bury the Dead has a great (and scarily realistic) premise and finds a new way into the zombie movie. It has a lot more heart, emotion and depth than your average zombie thriller. It is a movie about an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances, someone grieving the death of her husband and needing to find closure. Through flashbacks, we learn more about Ava and Mitch’s relationship and discover why they had unfinished business.
But there’s still plenty of zombie horror to entertain fans of the genre. The body retrieval process is grim, and you never know what Ava and Clay are going to find in each house. Plus, we have a range of zombies on offer here, from a 28 Days Later-style runner, to ones that seem totally brain-dead and others that seem quite intelligent. As always in these post-apocalyptic settings, there are some scary humans as well, and that’s where Riley (Mark Coles Smith) comes in. I liked the idea of his character, but my interest in the story wavered during this section.
We Bury the Dead has excellent opening and closing acts, but it unfortunately dips in the middle, and the story isn’t quite as gripping as I wanted it to be. It didn’t quite live up to its full potential, even though the final act puts it back on course. Ridley does a terrific job of holding it all together and is totally magnetic on-screen. She has more emotional range than you might expect to see in a zombie film, and she plays the stakes well.
Ridley has been choosing an interesting range of projects since The Rise of Skywalker, and We Bury the Dead is no exception. It’s definitely one to seek out if you’re a fan of her work.
We Bury the Dead is available on Digital HD 2nd February & Blu-ray & DVD 16th February
Read my interview with writer-director Zak Hilditch here