We Bury The Dead

We Bury the Dead is an Australian horror film that takes a sombre approach to the zombie apocalypse. 

The island of Tasmania is decimated after an experimental American weapon accidentally detonates off the East Coast. It kills every living thing, but some people come back to life with aggressive tendencies. Ava (Daisy Ridley) is an American who volunteers for the relief effort in the hope that she can find her husband. She sneaks away from her unit with Clay (Brenton Thwaites) and travels to Woodbridge, where the Australian military is still operating. 

Zombie fiction has been ever-present in pop culture, especially during the 2010s. There was so much zombie fiction that the world could have ended, and the remnants of society would have still made zombie stories to cope. We Bury the Dead aimed to have a more scientific explanation of why people turned into the living dead. The event was localised, and it was portrayed as a humanitarian mission after a disaster. The job of the volunteers was to find bodies and identify them, which some people found overwhelming. The first act was impactful as the characters explore the suburbs in a standstill while bodies pile up. This exploration of people’s homes made We Bury the Dead feel a bit like The Last of Us when Josh and Ellie visit houses and learn about their lives before the apocalypse. 

We Bury the Dead was a slower-paced film that explored the impact of the incident. There were questions about why certain people came back and desperate people searching for their loved ones to come back, even if it meant they came as a mindless husk. This idea has been explored in other zombie stories (i.e. Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead). We Bury the Dead did dig a little deeper as it showed Tasmania suffered from collective grief. There was also the question about how much of a person’s mind remained in a resurrected person, or whether they would always be a mindless monster. One of the most powerful scenes in the film was when Ava caught a resurrected person doing more human actions. 

The issue with most zombie fiction is that most ideas have already been explored. We Bury the Dead struggles to overcome this issue since it was exploring well-trodden territory. It aimed to be more of a character piece as Ava travels, thinking about her husband and seeing the devastation that ravaged Tasmania. It did require an excellent performance from its lead actress, and Daisy Ridley was a strong anchor for the film. She was strong-willed and determined, which contrasted with the cynical Clay or the desperate Riley (Mark Coles Smith). It is great to see Ridley do smaller movies after her Star Wars success, similar to what Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart did after Twilight. 

We Bury the Dead was more like the zombie apocalypse version of Monsters. It was about two people having to travel into a quarantine zone and philosophise about life. Like Monsters, We Bury the Dead takes place in the aftermath of an event that changes the world. In We Bury the Dead, the event was more recent.

We Bury the Dead was more of a drama than a traditional zombie film. It doesn’t have the thrills or tension of films in the 28 Days Later series or the social commentary of the Living Dead films. Because of the oppressive grimness and slow pace, We Bury the Dead will be a Marmite film. The scores on Rotten Tomatoes were proof of this. 

We Bury the Dead is an acquired taste of a film. It was a slow and thoughtful film that used a simple story to ask big questions. However, the slow and thoughtful approach will be a turn-off for some audiences since they would see it as boring.