We Bury the Dead doesn’t do anything particularly original with the zombie movie. I don’t think there is a single new thing added to the genre. Yet it still feels fresh and vibrant. The way that it pieces together these various common aspects of the genre makes it feel new.
Buy We Bury the DeadStupid Americans accidentally unleash an experimental weapon off the coast of Tasmania, killing every living creature on the island. It wasn’t an explosive, so nothing was destroyed. It was some kind of pulse that fried everyone’s brain, causing them to drop dead where they were.
The Australian government asks the world for assistance with the cleanup. An American, Ava (Daisy Ridley), volunteers, but she’s really just hoping to find her husband, Mitch (Matt Whelen), who was on the island at the time of the accident.
She is assigned to the body-cleanup department, which entails going into houses and dragging out bodies. The thing is, some of those bodies aren’t quite dead. They aren’t exactly zombies either. At least not in the traditional sense. They aren’t trying to eat your brains at any rate.
They mostly stand about, or move with great slowness (even for a “slow zombie”). Some folks think they can see life behind their eyes and hope that perhaps there is a way to make them “human” again. Eva is one of those people, and she desperately wants to see if her husband might still have some life in him. But the government has no intention of trying to figure out if there is still life in any of these bodies. When any of them move, they shoot them in the head.
Ava is teamed up with Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a long-haired biker who is the type of guy who isn’t afraid of taking a snort of cocaine lying in the midst of what’s left of a bachelor party littered with dead dudes and a zombified stripper. When they find a nice motorcycle, she talks him into taking her south to find her husband. They’ll soon discover that the longer the undead stay alive, the freer their movement becomes and the more agitated they get. In other words, they become true zombies. But like all horror movies, they’ll also learn that the true monsters are the living. They’ll come across a soldier (Mark Coles Smith) whose grief over his dead wife causes him to do horrible things.
Unlike most zombie movies, We Bury the Dead is a slow burn. There is very little zombie action to speak of, very little action if I’m being honest. But when it does come, it is explosive and terrifying. I guess it wouldn’t be a modern horror movie if it wasn’t about grief or trauma, and that’s exactly what this is.
Daisy Ridley is excellent as usual. She plays Ava’s cards close to the chest, like she doesn’t want anyone to know what she’s thinking. It is a great juxtaposition against Brenton Thwaites’s portrayal of Clay, who is an open book, loud, and obnoxious.
Filmed in Western Australia, director Zak Hilditch gives it a Mad Max vibe with empty streets, cities on fire, and smoke-filled desolation. He’s deliberate with his filmmaking, and you have to have patience with it. This is not your father’s zombie movie. But if you let it unfold without preconceived ideas of what it should be and allow it to be what it is, you might find something quite wonderful.
Sadly, this Blu-ray from Vertical Entertainment comes with absolutely no special features or extras. But the movie is more than enough to allow me to recommend the purchase.
