WE BURY THE DEAD movie poster | ©2025 Vertical

Rating: R
Stars: Daisy Ridley, Brenton Thwaites, Mark Coles Riley, Matt Whelan, Chloe Hurst, Kym Jackson
Writer: Zak Hilditch
Director: Zak Hilditch
Distributor: Vertical
Release Date: January 2, 2026

Technically, WE BURY THE DEAD is a zombie movie. That is, it has decomposed corpses that come back to life and sometimes make alarming movements.

However, at the risk of being spoilerish but to make sure audience members know what they will and won’t be getting, it should be said WE BURY THE DEAD is not a zombie movie in the conventional sense, as it doesn’t much depict trying to survive being physically harmed by the undead.

What WE BURY THE DEAD is mainly about is dealing with grief of various stripes – from mortal loss, from alienation, from shame.

When we first meet American couple Ava (Daisy Ridley) and Mitch (Matt Whelan), they are blissfully happy at their wedding banquet.

Sometime after this comes a news broadcast. The U.S. has accidentally detonated an electromagnetic weapon of the coast of the large Australian island of Tasmania, instantaneously killing 500,000 humans and every other living being in range.

However, some of the corpses are reanimating and, the warning goes, becoming more aggressive the longer they’re alive. No one seems to know why some stay down and others rise up.

Mitch, between the wedding and the newscast, has gone to a resort on Tasmania’s southern shore, squarely in the blast zone. Ava flies to Tasmania as a Body Retrieval volunteer. The volunteers are all meant to send up a flare for armed military assistance if they encounter one of the living dead. The south end of the island is totally off-limits to civilians.

Despite these rules, Ava is determined to find Mitch, to discover his condition and perhaps even to rescue him. In the tradition of many genre films, the living can prove at least as dangerous, if not more so, as the dead.

Ridley gives Ava the requisite backbone while retaining vulnerability. Whelan handles Mitch well. Brenton Thwaits and Mark Coles Riley are both effective as very different local men. Kym Jackson has some sharp moments as an Australian military officer who thinks that, as Americans caused the calamity in the first place, they should have the decency to stay away.

Writer/director Zak Hilditch wants to build in character surprises, not just jump scares, so he seeds in revealing flashbacks throughout, each one shedding light on Ava’s state of mind, as well as that of some individuals she encounters.

Hilditch also grounds the start of the film in suburbia that will be recognizable to anyone from Tasmania to Taos, NM, which gives a backdrop of normalcy to all of this, demonstrating that not all gigantic disasters occur in bizarre hellscapes.

This makes WE BURY THE DEAD intriguing intellectually, and the perils Ava faces give the movie a thriller aspect. It’s not until the climax that we discover exactly what kind of story Hilditch is telling. Whether one finds this novel and ingenious or more like coming to the end of a Rube Goldberg contraption will be largely contingent on one’s feelings about what WE BURY THE DEAD turns out to resolve. It shouldn’t alienate anyone either way.

Still, the gory deterioration of some of the bodies and the general set-up prime us for things that don’t happen. WE BURY THE DEAD is, if not precisely moving, an inventively uncommon exploration of emotional need and trauma that refuses to stay buried. It just isn’t a zombie horror movie.

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