THE STORY – After a catastrophic military disaster, the dead don’t just rise; they hunt. Ava searches for her missing husband, but what she finds is far more terrifying.
THE CAST – Daisy Ridley, Mark Coles Smith & Brenton Thwaites
THE TEAM – Zak Hilditch (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
Classic horror monsters go through reinventions on what can feel like a scheduled regimen. This century alone, we’ve had sexy sparkly vampires (“Twilight”), nasty old vampires (“Nosferatu“), and goofy animated ones (“Hotel Transylvania“). And now, if Guillermo del Toro’s recently-released “Frankenstein” didn’t do it for you, there’s another version of Mary Shelley’s monster coming in the spring with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!“ But arguably, no horrific creature has been seen in as many various forms as the zombie. There’s the classic version (“Night of the Living Dead”) and its upgrade (“Dawn of the Dead”), fast zombies (“28 Days Later“), funny zombies (“Shaun of the Dead“), and many, many others. It feels as if there’s nothing new to do with cinematic depictions of the undead. But like a corpse reawakened, “We Bury the Dead“ has shuffled into theaters to prove that fear wrong. Zak Hilditch’s film, ironically, brings new life to the zombie movie, finding unexplored territory within the horror subgenre. It’s impressively constructed and oftentimes shocking, all centered around a fantastic performance from Daisy Ridley, delivering the best work since her breakout role in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.“
Ridley plays Ava, a young American woman who travels to Tasmania, off the coast of Australia, to search for her husband. Disaster struck the island after the U.S. military deployed an experimental weapon in what was supposedly an accident, sending out an electromagnetic pulse that instantly shut down the brain functions of over 500,000 people. Ava goes there to volunteer in the clean-up efforts, hoping to slip away and journey to the quarantined southern section of the island. But the bodies that litter Tasmania aren’t at rest. To the horror and confusion of all, some of the deceased have begun to come back to life, but not with the same personalities that they had when alive. The undead seem hungry and are undoubtedly frightening, though not exactly in the way those encountering them (and thus viewers) are likely used to from typical zombie stories.
Ava is at the center of the film, meaning Ridley is on-screen for nearly the entire runtime. And the actress is just as up to the task as she was when she was responsible for leading the rebirth of the “Star Wars“ franchise as a total unknown. She spends a good amount of the film in close-up, often giving wide-eyed, wordless reactions to the baffling actions of the men she encounters on her misadventure. Her expressive facial responses are controlled and effective, telling as much with just her eyes as any line of dialogue could (Norma Desmond would be proud). She also has to adopt an American accent, and her strong natural English accent never pokes through. It’s an incredible performance from an actress that many have been rooting for across the past decade, totally fulfilling the promise of her potential that she displayed when she first picked up a lightsaber.
As in most zombie movies, the living, breathing humans of the story are just as scary – if not more so – than the undead. Ava must face a handful of men who take advantage of the apocalyptic situation, making her journey feel like an Odyssey-level series of tasks and trials to reach the finish line: her lost love. The film emphasizes the unsettling behavior of the living, and as a result, it feels a bit light on actual zombie-based action. In fact, not all of the dead are brought back to life, and some of the scariest moments in the film come from the discovery of corpses in precisely the spot and position they were in when the military accident occurred. Bodies are found mid-relaxing afternoon, mid-bachelor party, and mid-yoga class, and every time the film pulls this trick, it’s disturbing. The reanimated are essentially an excuse for the still-living characters to behave poorly, acting on their typically repressed violent, antisocial impulses. One sequence involving a military man named Riley (a chilling performance by Mark Coles Smith), hoping to be reunited with his pregnant wife, is particularly disturbing, leading to an unsettling discovery by Ava.
But that’s nothing compared to a small, quiet scene later in the film involving a zombie and a shovel. To say anything else would be to spoil the film’s most impressive moment. It’s a silent sequence between Ava and one of the undead, and Hilditch manages to do something completely new with the well-but-slowly-trod ground of zombie movies. It’s so simple but so effective that it actually made this critic gasp. It truly encapsulates the essence of “survival horror,“ demonstrating humanity’s ability to persevere even in the most disastrous situations.
Zak Hilditch has crafted a harrowing, unsettling zombie movie that totally enmeshes the audience in its collapsing world. The camera is always perfectly placed, and the sound work (the zombies’ gnashing teeth is particularly spine-tingling) creates an enveloping soundtrack of terror. And as might be expected, the gore effects and creature designs are fantastic, leading to some gnarly screen images. “We Bury the Dead“ manages to pump new blood into the far-from-fresh corpse that is the zombie movie.
