We Bury the Dead (2024) Review

We Bury the Dead (2025) reframes the classic zombie story with subtlety and high-tension drama. Director Zak Hilditch doesn’t turn the zombie (or infected) subgenre on its head but rather delves into the substantive themes of love, desperation, and how we deal with tragedy. We Bury the Dead is familiar but not stale and will have audiences glued to the screen with enigmatic performances from leading actress Daisy Ridley, a healthy dose of fright, and a plot that will break your heart a few times before the hour and thirty-minute runtime is up.

Daisy Ridley plays Ava, a woman searching for her husband whose fallen victim to an apocalyptic bioweapon launched over Tasmania. She first volunteers to find and identify the corpses left in the wake of the devastation. This is where she learns that some victims are “coming back” at random, but these reanimations seem to be the smallest threat against her as she embarks on her journey for closure.

This takes more of a Jaws approach when it comes to scares; it slowly hints that monsters are waiting out there, but it doesn’t reveal them right away. Instead, Ava and her fellow volunteers comb through the neighborhood that halted in time. The sense of dread slowly builds until the reveal of the first reanimated, which was a striking sight that, like Ava, had me frozen in fear. From then on, every encounter with a zombie gets more intense, which showcases a sort of evolution in their postlife.

The design of the infected is pretty standard, but the addition of nauseating teeth grinding and jaw popping gave them a unique presence on screen. There are also some brutal kill scenes that highlight a talented effects team without creating an all-out gore-fest. The grotesque isn’t really the point here; it’s what the grotesque does and represents. The theme of “having unfinished business” runs through the plot from Ava looking for some type of closure in finding her husband to the dead themselves trying to complete their final acts.

High tension is carried through the film, even when zombies are not in sight, by Ava’s laser focus. Ridley’s body language and facial expressions do most of the work here, portraying a determined woman on a mission. She is reliving past trauma through flashbacks of happy memories and night terrors that reflect her current reality. While these scenes provided a wealth of context, I feel like there were a few too many, and it bogged down the pace of the film. Amidst this emotional turmoil, Ava keeps herself on the path to closure, picking up a helpful hand in the charmingly reckless and somewhat broken Clay, played by Brenton Thwaites. Ava and Clay’s reluctant-at-first camaraderie provided the perfect dose of levity as they tread further across the barren landscape.

We Bury the Dead is a welcome new perspective in the zombie/infected genre. It has more heart and drama than running from the undead, but still scratches the horror itch while delivering a complex, heartwrenching, and hopeful story.

Movie Rating:

We Bury the Dead trailer