My Thoughts On We Bury The Dead
January is a month with certain reputation when it comes to movies, and especially horror movies, as if they’re being asked to quietly exist rather than make a statement, and by the time this movie wrapped up, that placement made a lot of sense.
We Bury The Dead follows Ava (Daisy Ridley), who travels to Tasmania after a large scale military disaster has left the island cut off and unsafe, where she signs up for a body retrieval unit tasked with recovering the dead left behind in the aftermath.
But, she’s also searching for her husband, who may still be alive somewhere in the quarantined southern region of the island, and once Ava joins the unit, she’s paired with Clay (Brenton Thwaites), who is quiet, detached, and seemingly drifting through life without much direction, and this partnership forms the emotional backbone of the movie, whether the film fully realizes that or not.
And as they move through the island together, they encounter burned out landscapes, abandoned structures, roaming undead, and survivors who have become just as dangerous as the zombies.
The best thing about We Bury The Dead is that is looks pretty good, with wide shots of the island that feel ever so bleak, and the zombies themselves stand out as well, as they don’t move or look quite right, and that sense of wrongness goes a long way.
Daisy Ridley carries the film more than anyone else involved, where she gives Ava a sense of weight and exhaustion that feels appropriate for someone carrying guilt, fear, and hope all at once, and I did find myself more interested in her reactions than in what the story was doing around her, which probably isn't a good thing.
Brenton Thwaites also does fine with what he’s given, but Clay never becomes especially engaging, and for most of the runtime, he exists in a sort of emotional fog, as the movie never really digs into who he was or why he acts the way he does, but that curiosity wasn’t rewarded until very late, and even then it felt too rushed.
The biggest issue I had with We Bury the Dead though was the overwhelming feeling that the movie didn’t know what it wanted to say, as I think zombie movies need a clear angle or purpose to stand out, and this film gestures toward ideas about grief, regret, and personal responsibility, but it never really commits to exploring them in a meaningful way, where scenes hint at bring some depth to it all, before moving on before anything has time to settle.
The runtime is another strange choice.
At just under 100 minutes, it feels oddly compressed, where important beats come and go quickly, while other scenes stretch out without adding much, and the film definitely needed to spend a bit more time on developing its characters and less time spent circling the same ideas, because as it stands, it feels like a longer story squeezed into a shorter frame.
The relationship between Ava and her husband is a good example of this problem.
The film strongly suggests serious issues between them, possibly involving betrayal, but never clearly explains what happened, which becomes a problem by the time the story reaches its conclusion, where the ending depends on emotional weight that the film never fully earns.
There’s also a broader issue of familiarity, as so much of We Bury the Dead feels borrowed from better zombie films without adding much of its own personality - the structure, the encounters, even the character types all feel too recognizable, and while that doesn’t automatically make a movie bad, it does raise the bar for execution, and here, the execution is mostly serviceable, rarely inspired.
But, there are certainly moments that show some real care in between everything else, especially in the visuals and Ridley’s performance. and the film clearly wants to be somber and reflective, even if it doesn’t always succeed, and I just wish that same care had been applied to the writing and character development.
We Bury the Dead leaves you with the sense that it could have been more than what it is, as it settles for being passable background noise in a genre crowded with much much stronger entries.