‘We Bury The Dead’: Daisy Ridley Stars In New Poignant Zombie Film [SXSW 2025 Review]
I love a good zombie action flick, but lately, I’ve found myself gravitating toward filmmakers who have made more somber films about the undead. From Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan to Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead, there’s been a trend of zombie films that have featured survivors afflicted by the hell of living while their loved ones have passed (or become flesh-eating monsters). Director Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead is a welcome addition to this grim zombie canon, a film less about the sting of death’s separation and more about the pain of what goes unsaid when tragedy strikes.
The ever-adept Daisy Ridley (she single-handedly elevated Cleaner earlier this year) stars as Ava Newman, who lost her husband (Matt Whelan), in the aftermath of a military experiment that went horrifically wrong. In this world, the acting US President launched an explosive device on Tasmania which killed half a million people, some affected by the explosion itself and others by a pulse that was shockwaved out and turned off people’s brains. As the military begin to clean up bodies and help citizens rebuild, some of the dead (particularly those whose brains were shot off by the pulse) begin to show signs of life.
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The military assuage fears by saying that the undead aren’t aggressive, sans for the ways they violently and repeatedly gnash their teeth (credit to the sound department for making the sound of enamel grinding utterly terrifying) and any deceased person found breathing is immediately killed by soldiers. Ava joins a body retrieval unit in the hopes of finding her husband, hoping that seeing him in any form will offer a sense of closure for the unresolved conflict she had with them. Convincing another volunteer, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), to help her, the two break off from their assigned task to find Ava’s husband, unaware that the undead are showing increased signs of aggression.
For most of We Bury the Dead, we follow Ava and Clay as they go on a post-apocalyptic tour guide of Tasmania, their journey acting as a document of how people have responded to this catastrophe. Without being too heavy-handed, Zak Hilditch layers poignant real-world commentary that critiques how people see other people’s tragedy as a way to profit. It’s grating to see the ways the government conscripts citizens to help clean up the mess they’ve caused, a reminder of how civilians always are the ones to suffer the most in the fallout of bureaucratic irresponsibility.
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A particularly chilling episode sees Ava and Clay getting spotted by a soldier, Riley (Mark Coles Smith). Riley shows compassion for Ava’s situation and offers to drive her the rest of the way to the hotel where her husband stayed. Ava reluctantly agrees, but is also cognizant of the power dynamics at play. Ridley demonstrates her range here yet again, keeping her character’s fright masked under a poker face of competency and resourcefulness. To say more about what happens to Riley and Ava would spoil one of the best sequences in the film. But it’s all to say that Hilditch’s film has some choice words for the ways people in power, particularly in the military, often use the guise of wanting to “help” to find ways to abuse their power and subjugate others.
We Bury the Dead never quite gets as gnarly as violent as its title may suggest, but that’s largely because it’s not concerned with providing surface-level thrills. At the end of the day, no matter how frightening the undead are, it’s always the living who cause the most issues. Hilditch and his cast understand how to use their zombies as a supplement to interpersonal conflict between the characters rather than making “fighting” them the central point.
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Part of what drives Ava so fiercely in her mission is that before her husband left, they were in a rough patch of their marriage. Even though when the dead rise, they don’t register or have any sign of comprehension, Ava still seeks a form of closure. She’d rather risk being captured by the authorities (or being attacked by zombies) rather than live with the pain of not knowing what her husband may have thought of her.
To that end, We Bury the Dead is much more about the pain of what gets unsaid, the unique sorrow that comes when we realize we never got to say the things we wanted to articulate, and the secrets that may have died with someone we love. There’s a palpable sense of anguish that courses through Ava as she switches between disillusionment and hope that her husband is alive, knowing that there is probably more to him than she can hope to understand. Yet there’s also a finality that she won’t see that side of him. This unique melancholy and exploration of a grieving woman’s interiority makes We Bury the Dead leave a long, animating impression that shambles along in your mind even after the credits have rolled.
Summary
Director Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead is a welcome addition to the grim zombie canon, a film less about the sting of death’s separation and more about the pain of what goes unsaid when tragedy strikes.
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