‘We Bury the Dead’ Finds Horror in Grief, Not the Undead

Ever since 28 Days Later (2002) popularized the idea of the viral zombie — in contrast to the supernatural zombies of Night of the Living Dead (1968) — the genre has had a core tension. Namely, once humans become mindless, they become less frightening, since thought and intention are what make humans scary. Walking Dead quickly realized that and made scary humans the heart of later seasons. It’s from this vantage point that We Bury The Dead gives us a more cerebral take on the zombie flick where the living dead are less dangerous than they are deeply unsettling reminders of their former humanity. It’s an introspective ghost story that only really stumbles when it leans into the stereotypes of the zombie genre and goes for gruesome violence rather than dead-eyed stare.

We Bury the Dead ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Zack Hilditch
Written by: Zack Hilditch
Starring: Daisy Ridley, Mark Coles Smith, Brenton Thwaites
Running time: 95 mins

We Bury The Dead stars Daisy Ridley from Star Wars as Ava, a physical therapist whose husband was visiting Tasmania on a work retreat at the same time as a disastrous American weapons test destroyed the neurons of everyone on the island. This deus ex machina leaves Ava as one of many volunteers working cleanup on a gross, unsettling job that isn’t especially dangerous. Volunteers who have come to the island after the test lug corpses around in return for the hope they’ll find catharsis in the work and maybe emotional closure if one of the corpses is a loved one.

At no point are the zombie implied to be an existential threat to humanity. They’re barely even a threat to Ava or any of the other volunteers. The neuron-destroying superweapon that caused all this death and destruction was used exactly once, probably never again, and the victims of this horrific bomb can’t somehow infect healthy people with their brain damage. At one point Ava is even mocked for wearing a pointless mask for the physically intensive work. Later on, we learn that masks are only standard issue because the sudden brain death of everyone in Tasmania led to some pretty nasty industrial fires.

Nestled within the broader story of Ava’s work in Tasmania are flashbacks to her relationship with her husband, her whole purpose in coming to Tasmania, because he had the bad luck to be in Tasmania on a work retreat when the weapon went off. These flashbacks take on a darker turn the longer the film goes on, giving the impression that the Tasmanian tragedy caused a very awkward, very abrupt ending to an extended romantic drama that might or might not have had a happy reconciliation. Now, Ava will never know.

We Bury The Dead is, in this way, mainly a story about wishful thinking. Ava knows full well that there is no happy ending waiting for her. Either her husband is dead, or his brain has been badly damaged enough that he’s a zombie who ideally just wants to be put out of his misery. Ava’s focus on her husband above all other concerns is a form of tunnel vision demonstrating her unwillingness to move on and “bury the dead.”

Apart from her husband, we learn nothing about Ava’s family. Whether she doesn’t have any, is estranged from them, or just doesn’t care about them enough to talk or think about them gives the impression that Ava simply doesn’t have that much to live for anymore at this point. Or at least that this is what she believes.

Beyond this search for closure, a helpless belief in improbable, undefinable happy endings is the other major theme of We Bury The Dead. Most of the people in Tasmania are simply dead, and not all of the zombies are violent, though it’s explicitly noted that the longer a zombie remains alive, the more upset they seem to become at the fact of their existence. Ava’s theory, though it’s not at all scientific, is that the difference between a dead person and a zombie in Tasmania is that the zombies have unfinished business of some sort allowing a thin thread of life to remain. This idea makes them less zombies than ghosts, and despite both being horror movie staples, Ava comforts herself with the idea that willpower alone can prove stronger than death, even if the willpower of the living hasn’t been doing any of them a visible amount of good.

Of course, the sadder truth, explicitly stated almost immediately and repeated at regular intervals throughout the film, is that whether any random Tasmanian resident maintains some spark of life as a zombie or is just unambiguously dead seems to be little more than random freak chance. With no greater risk of infection to the world at large, all that’s left for Ava is to accept the fact that she’s still alive, and her husband isn’t. Moving on from the grief, rather than the end of the world, is the main point of drama here. Unlike typical zombie genre films, We Bury The Dead does not need to put the world at risk for us to care what happens, just Ava. Instead of breadth, it aims for depth — the stake is not human survival but one human’s survival. This makes the film feel weightier than most other zombie movies. Here there’s no survivalist fantasy, just the grim acceptance that whatever happens to any of us, is farther beyond our control than we’d like to admit.