Zak Hilditch has a gift for making the end of the world feel uncomfortably small and intimate. In We Bury the Dead, he moves away from the global panic of These Final Hours and the period piece dread of 1922 to give us something that feels like a heavy, dirt-stained funeral shroud. Set in the immediate, muddy aftermath of a U.S. military experiment gone wrong off the coast of Tasmania, the movie isn't interested in the why of the catastrophe as much as the how of the mourning. It is a film about the physical, back-breaking labor of grief, and it is easily the most grounded work Daisy Ridley has ever put on screen.
The setup is bleak and procedural. An experimental weapon detonates, wiping out Hobart and leaving the rest of the island’s population brain-dead. But as the military and civilian volunteers quickly realize, these bodies don't stay still. They regain motor function, becoming a quiet, stumbling breed of the undead that are more tragic than they are terrifying. Ridley plays Ava, an American physiotherapist who joins a body recovery unit not out of a grand sense of duty, but because she is trapped in the agonizing limbo of not knowing if her husband, Mitch, survived his business trip to Woodbridge.
The film treats this search with a clinical coldness that is genuinely unsettling. You see the tags, the heavy plastic of the body bags, and the way the workers eventually become numb to the sight of human remains. The Tasmanian Gothic atmosphere is thick and gray, captured by Steve Annis in a way that makes the forest look ancient and uncaring. It is the kind of environment where you can believe the natural order has simply given up. This isn't a zombie movie in the sense of gore and headshots; it is a movie set squarely in the bureaucracy of mass death.
The real meat of the story begins when Ava decides she is done waiting for the military to move. She teams up with Clay, played by Brenton Thwaites, and heads across the island on a motorcycle, eventually running into Riley, played with a terrifying, unspooled energy by Mark Coles Smith. Riley is the film’s most haunting element, a man who has completely lost his mind to grief. He keeps the pregnant, undead corpse of his wife in a shrine-like bedroom and forces Ava to wear her clothes and dance with him. It is a sequence that highlights the madness of denial, and it is where Hilditch introduces his most interesting idea: the unfinished business theory. Riley believes the dead only wake up because they have something left to do, turning their reanimation into a physical manifestation of regret.
There is a sequence in the middle of the film that perfectly captures this vibe. Ava finds an undead father in a camper van who is calmly using a shovel to dig a grave for himself and his family. There is no hunger or rage in him; there is only the mechanical, domestic drive to finish the act of burial. Ava helps him dig, and in a moment of profound, quiet horror, he allows her to kill him before she finishes the task. It is a scene that stays with you, stripping away the monster aspect of the undead and replacing it with something deeply human and sad.
As Ava finally reaches Woodbridge, the film pulls the rug out from under her. Through flashbacks, we see that her marriage was already falling apart due to an affair, a failed attempt to conceive, and a lot of unspoken resentment. When she finds Mitch, he hasn't woken up because, as it turns out, he didn't have unfinished business with her. He had already moved on with a coworker before he died. This revelation is devastating; it turns her entire heroic quest into a confrontation with a ghost who had already left her. She gives him a Viking funeral on a motorboat, not because she is honoring a great love, but because she is finally letting go of a burden.
The technical side of the film is just as heavy. Clark's score is a sonic wall of haunted voices that feels like it is vibrating in your teeth, and the inclusion of tracks by PJ Harvey and Can adds a layer of raw, jagged emotion to the gray Tasmanian landscapes. It doesn't feel like a polished Hollywood production; it feels like a movie made with dirt under its fingernails.
The ending takes a bold swing that will likely split audiences. The film closes on a note of tearful, uneasy relief. Not a clean resolution, but a reminder: even when a superpower like the US seems determined to unravel itself and the world around it, flirting with collapse, life doesn’t simply end. Something persists, something adapts. The world we recognize may not survive the damage, but life, in some altered form, keeps going, quietly beginning again in the wreckage.
We Bury the Dead is a movie that respects the audience's intelligence enough not to offer easy answers. It is a meditation on the fact that we can bury a body, but we can never truly bury the hole that person left behind. Daisy Ridley delivers a soot-stained, exhausted performance that proves she is a formidable dramatic talent. It is a grim, beautiful funeral for the world as we knew it, and it understands that the things we bury, be they bodies, secrets, or grief, rarely stay down for long. If you want horror that leaves a bruise on the soul rather than just a jump in the seat, this is a journey worth taking. It is a visceral reminder that the hardest part of the apocalypse isn't surviving it; it is the cleanup.
We Burry The Dead is now available on Blu-ray to own.
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