January is usually cinema’s nowhere stretch, when micro-budget horrors jostle for attention between awards hopefuls and the outright hopeless. But sometimes low expectations yield surprises, as in “We Bury the Dead,” a chiller set in Tasmania with deeper concerns than genre mayhem.
Written and directed with economy and efficiency by Australia’s Zak Hilditch, it’s a zombie film preoccupied less with the ambling undead than with what it means to still be alive. Hilditch considers it a companion piece to “These Final Hours,” his last-day-on-Earth drama that screened in the Directors’ Fortnight program at Cannes in 2014.
Even when the narrative leans on familiar zombie tropes, Hilditch keeps grief as the film’s organizing principle. The dead never stay still because mourning won’t either.
“We Bury the Dead” stars Daisy Ridley, a veteran of three (and counting) “Star Wars” features. A decade ago she was touted to be the next Keira Knightley or Natalie Portman. Instead, she chose to keep on being the first Daisy Ridley. This more ennobling career path has kept her mainly in small indie films like this one, rather than franchise behemoths.
Her restraint grounds the role of Ava, a California physiotherapist married to an Aussie businessman, Mitch (Matt Whelan), whose sudden disappearance prompts a momentous journey for Ava. Flashbacks reveal stress in the marriage of the young couple, including frustrations in their attempts to have a baby.
Mitch vanishes in the Aussie island state of Tasmania just as an American sonic experiment, coyly dubbed “the pulse,” wipes out half a million locals, muddling their brains and freezing everybody mid-task like a giant human screensaver.
Ava, unable to accept Mitch’s almost certain demise, flies to Tasmania and joins a volunteer body retrieval force, boldly venturing into the island the Aussie military has locked into quarantine.
While she struggles to process her situation and deal with the arduous work of removing the fallen, Ava learns some of the corpses have started to “come back online,” with everything from eye blinks to stumbling walks indicating some version of sentience. A character comments they’re reanimating because they have “unfinished business.”
They’re zombies, in other words, although I don’t think anyone ever uses the term in the film. The military insists the twitching dead are “docile” and they’ll be treated with “dignity.” Both lies unravel quickly.
Ava teams up with a local construction worker, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a cynical rebel with family issues of his own, for a daring motorcycle trip into the southern part of the island. Their destination is the resort town of Woodbridge, where Mitch’s corporate retreat was happening.
The pair are headed deep into the quarantine zone as wildfires rage and the abundant undead become more animated. The zombies emit a grinding dental rasp (kudos to sound designers Duncan Campbell and Tom Heuzenroeder) that recalls the Clicker horrors of the TV series “The Last of Us.”
The further Ava and Clay travel, the more dangerous the zombies get. But it’s their fellow human survivors who may pose more of a threat.
Anyone who has ever seen a zombie movie can imagine the terrors that await these road travellers, although Hilditch resists the genre’s usual sensory assault. In fact, the filmmaker wasn’t planning a zombie movie at all when he first began writing “We Bury the Dead” while grieving the death of his mother during the COVID lockdowns.
The original screenplay, more of a character’s journey through loss, didn’t have zombies in it. The addition of them often seems arbitrary, as well as derivative of other zombie movies, especially the “28 Days Later” franchise that Hilditch acknowledges as a major influence. (There’s one development late in his film that has a shock scene remarkably similar to one in last summer’s “28 Years Later,” although it’s clearly a coincidence since “We Bury the Dead” premiered at SXSW last spring.)
The “28 Days” franchise also seems to have inspired the camerawork of Steve Annis, who uses controlled lighting and a nimble lens to keep the viewer locked into Ava’s disorientation as she moves through a striking landscape where beautiful vistas are marred by death and devastation.
Inspiration also comes from less obvious sources. One of the film’s most unnerving interludes recalls a spooky section of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which isn’t about zombies but is similarly obsessed with idealized images of people.
“We Bury the Dead” has noteworthy moments all its own, particularly a gravedigging scene illustrating the film’s title. It’s one of the most tender I’ve ever seen in a zombie movie.
Hilditch isn’t beholden to the usual rules of undead cinema. A bite from a zombie apparently doesn’t cause a horrific transformation in its victim. And while Ava and Clay and other humans aren’t afraid to use weapons — Ava carries an axe at one point — guns aren’t nearly as plentiful as they usually are in zombie movies, especially American ones.
The soundtrack pairs composer Chris Clark’s atmospheric, electronics-forward score with a jolt of familiar pop that rewires the scenes’ energy, including tracks by Amyl & the Sniffers, PJ Harvey, Can and Metric.
Our attention remains focused on Ava, the film’s most curious presence. She’s a watcher of the undead who seems half in mourning for herself. Ridley’s quiet magnetism steadies “We Bury the Dead” through its shakier stretches, while Hilditch steers by emotion rather than fear. Both are chasing a reckoning with loss that flickers, achingly, just beyond reach.
