There are zombie movies, and then there are films that use the undead as a pressure test for the soul. We Bury The Dead sits squarely in the latter camp, a bruised, mournful, often beautiful take on the apocalypse that’s far more interested in grief than in guts.
Set in the aftermath of a catastrophic American military experiment that leaves much of Tasmania wiped out and some of its dead inconveniently mobile, the film follows Ava (a superb Daisy Ridley), who joins a body-recovery unit in the hope of finding her husband. It’s a simple, devastating hook: she isn’t trying to survive the apocalypse — she’s trying to finish a marriage.
From there, director Zak Hilditch steers the film away from the genre’s usual sadistic thrills and into something closer to The Road filtered through 28 Days Later. Yes, there are shambling corpses and bursts of brutal violence, but the real horror comes from what the living are forced to do to keep going. Everybody that Ava helps bag, tag and burn feels like another small funeral, and the movie makes sure you feel every single one.
Despite a wavering American accent, Ridley gives one of her most stripped-back performances to date, carrying the film on a face that slowly hardens as hope and exhaustion wrestle for control. She’s beautifully supported by Brenton Thwaites as Clay and Mark Cole Smith as Riley. The latter is a scene-stealing wildcard whose appearance injects the film with dangerous, unpredictable energy, which delivers some of the film’s most powerful moments.
Visually, We Bury the Dead is stunning in a bleak, scorched-earth kind of way. Tasmanian landscapes, usually sold as a postcard paradise, are reimagined as fog-choked graveyards and blasted coastlines. Hilditch’s camera lingers on empty spaces and long silences, letting the devastation sink in. When the violence does hit, it’s sharp and ugly, never glamorised — this is death as work, not spectacle.
If the film falters at all, it’s in a third act that reaches a touch too far, straining for larger thematic statements that don’t always land as cleanly as the more restrained moments. But even then, it’s hard not to admire the ambition. This is, after all, a zombie film that’s trying to grapple with love, memory, and the painful necessity of letting go — and it mostly pulls it off.
In a genre dominated by noise and splatter, We Bury the Dead distinguishes itself by taking a more contemplative path. It’s an apocalypse movie less concerned with the end of the world than with the emotional wreckage left behind, recognising that the true horror isn’t the end of the world as we know it, but the people we lose along the way.
VERDICT:
Vertical released We Bury the Dead in theaters on January 2, 2026.
