Daisy Ridley must brave a zombie infested Tasmania to find her husband in 2026's We Bury the Dead. Yep, the zombie genre is still up and staggering. This one's not bad for about thirty-five minutes or so and then it loses its way. I wonder if that's why this movie made in 2024 wasn't released until this year. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone just forgot about it.
I kept thinking about how Carrie Fisher thought Daisy Ridley might be a clone of Keira Knightley. Seeing her in modern Earth clothes made her look even more Keira Knightley-ish.
The plot here is that the US accidentally detonated some kind of experimental chemical device off the coast of Tasmania and it killed everyone. Then some of the dead people started coming back to life. Knightley, I mean Ridley, plays in an American woman whose husband happened to be in Tasmania with some kind of research group. When she hears that some of the dead are waking up, she contrives to get herself included with one of the volunteer groups going to Tasmania to dispose of corpses.
I liked how there's some ambiguity as to whether the zombies retain any vestige of their former minds. You could see this as a step beyond Walking Dead era zombies, which functioned as metaphors for people who fall into poverty. Maybe this is a sign people are starting to have more empathy for the homeless. Then again, this movie didn't exactly light the world on fire.
There's nice build up and I loved moments like when Ridley's character is in a garage and suddenly realises a zombie has been quietly watching her from behind a bookcase. And we join her in watching the reanimated corpse's face intently, searching for signs of consciousness.
The movie loses its way when she's kidnapped by a nut who wants her to wear his dead wife's clothes and dance with him. For some reason, the filmmakers decided to skip over the moment when she agrees to do this for him, perhaps because they knew how implausible such a scene when be. However, its implausibility is still very much present in its absence. From then on, her character lacks sensible motive for almost everything she does and without her point of view the tension around the zombies evaporates. In the climax, we get a revelation about her relationship with her husband that undermines the sensibility of her motives even further. In the end, this leads not so much to an obnoxiously bad film but one without much sense of purpose. So it just kind of fades out.
We Bury the Dead is available on Hulu.
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