Somehow, zombies returned. Since hanging up the lightsaber — for now, anyway — in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, Daisy Ridley has covered an admirable amount of genres across smaller projects and with We Bury The Dead, survival horror seemed to be next on the list. Along with the 28 Years Later franchise, which has another entry out later this month and a trilogy capper due out next year, zombie films may have looked dead there for a moment but they’re back up and running now. In the case of We Bury The Dead, the latest from Australian director and writer Zak Hilditch, the walking dead function more as a backdrop upon which the survivors deal with the unresolved issues they have with those they lost. As such, the film is a bit too pensive and self-conscious for its own good but has enough worthwhile elements to make it a decent change of pace within the horror subgenre.
Ridley stars as Ava Newman, a physical therapist based in the US who travels to Tasmania in search of her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan) after an EMP weapon accidentally detonates and leaves tens of thousands on the island affected. It’s bad enough that the majority of the victims are dead but somehow even worse, some have awakened in a zombified state and attacked members of the rescue effort. This makes Ava’s job in the body retrieval unit more dangerous than it typically would be, although fellow volunteer Clay (Brenton Thwaites) doesn’t seem nearly as bothered by the state of things. Blithely lighting up a cigarette as he exits a corpse-infested house behind an upchucking teammate, Clay registers to Ava as a cooler head who will help her prevail through this tragedy. After the pair get acquainted and discover a motorcycle during one of their assignments, they plan to head south and look for Mitch.
In most zombie movies, the detours these two might encounter as they zoom down military-surveilled highways would involve gory run-ins with the undead but We Bury The Dead intentionally focuses on the humans that can still be just as dangerous. One such impediment, a soldier named Riley played by Mark Coles Smith, has a particularly creepy way to express his grief about losing his pregnant wife to the experimental explosion. Similarly, Hilditch treats us to flashbacks to Ava and Mitch stateside before the latter travelled down under for an ill-fated work trip, depicting a marriage that was already against the ropes before the accident in Australia. It’s an open question through most of the film how Ava will cope if she finds Mitch alive and unaffected by the zombie-like symptoms from the blast, as unlikely as that scenario might be.
Given the obviously heavy subject material, I appreciated Zak Hilditch’s attempts to dissipate the somber mood with tension-breaking moments of reckless relief or cheeky defiance. The groovy drum shuffle of “Vitamin C” by Can always hits the spot for the former and the latter is brought to the forefront nicely, thanks to a cut from raucous Aussie punk rockers Amyl And The Sniffers. A PJ Harvey track from Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea also scores a rare tender scene that still percolates with unease and the threat of violence. The stellar music moments stand out in a movie that’s a little too light on incident and oddly self-conscious about being a zombie flick. It’s clear Hilditch is trying to sidestep the rote horror beats we’d expect but too often, he substitutes them with moments that should fill us with dread but feel too sedate to register salient amounts of fear.
As with other decent indies like The Marsh King’s Daughter and Sometimes I Think About Dying that Daisy Ridley has starred in since her Rey-cation, her performance in We Bury The Dead is one of its strongest selling points. She’s an actress who simply does an outstanding job portraying introverts on-screen, suggesting genuine inner worlds within each of her characters that effortlessly draw us into these stories. Here, Ava has the determination and intellect we’ve seen Ridley convey with her heroines before but the scenes with Mitch showcase marital vulnerability that give us a deeper glimpse into Ava’s headspace. I applaud Ridley’s effort to pursue smaller projects, and likely help get them made with her name attached, but I also wish she’d hold out for scripts that are truly next level. She’s had quite a few base hits but she really deserves a home run.
Score – 3/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Primate, a natural horror film starring Johnny Sequoyah and Jessica Alexander, in which a tropical vacation goes awry when a family’s adopted chimpanzee is bitten by a rabid animal and suddenly becomes violent.
Also playing only in theaters is Greenland 2: Migration, a survival disaster thriller starring Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin, following a family who must leave the safety of their apocalypse bunker and embark on a perilous journey across the wasteland of Europe to find a new home.
Streaming on Netflix is People We Meet On Vacation, a romantic comedy starring Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, following a a free-spirited travel writer and and a a reserved teacher who reunite for one last trip to mend their friendship and confront their unspoken romantic feelings.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup