We Bury the Dead Review: Daisy Ridley Brings Quiet Power to a Thoughtful Zombie Survival Drama

In a genre that has been declared dead more times than its own shambling protagonists, the zombie film refuses to lie still. No matter how exhausted the formula becomes—die, reanimate, stumble, bite, repeat—filmmakers continue to exhume it, hoping to graft something new onto familiar bones. Sometimes that means bigger action, sometimes sharper satire, and increasingly, a heavy thematic focus on grief, trauma, and the emotional cost of survival.

Australian director Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead falls squarely into that latter category. It is a zombie movie that is less interested in body counts than in emotional fallout, less concerned with jump scares than with the quiet devastation left behind when the world ends unevenly. As this MLWBD We Bury the Dead review will explore, the film doesn’t radically reinvent the genre—but thanks largely to an impressively restrained performance from Daisy Ridley, it doesn’t need to.

A Zombie Film Released in the Dead Zone

Released on January 2—a date historically reserved for disposable horror schlock—We Bury the Dead initially looks like it might be another forgettable entry in the genre’s bargain bin. That calendar slot has previously hosted films like One Missed Call, Texas Chainsaw 3D, and Season of the Witch: loud, silly, and often cynically assembled.

Yet Hilditch’s film, partly funded by the Adelaide Film Festival and premiering at SXSW, is doing something quite different. It is not an exercise in ironic camp or gory excess. Instead, it’s a somber survival drama, set against the backdrop of a mass-casualty disaster that feels disturbingly plausible.

In a grimly believable inciting incident, a US government weapons accident detonates in Tasmania, killing approximately half a million people. Fires rage. Infrastructure collapses. And then, quietly, unnervingly, some of the dead begin to stir.

Grief Before Gore

What distinguishes We Bury the Dead early on is how little urgency surrounds the undead themselves. There is no immediate panic, no frantic scramble to understand what’s happening. Instead, the zombies are treated almost like a secondary complication—an unsettling curiosity rather than an existential terror.

This is not a world where characters immediately start shouting genre rules at each other. In fact, it often feels like no one here has ever seen a zombie movie. Corpses twitch. Some reanimate. Others don’t. There is no clear logic to who wakes up and who stays dead, and the characters respond with an eerie calm that borders on denial.

That lack of fear is not accidental. We Bury the Dead isn’t really about zombies—it’s about loss, and the strange emotional limbo that follows catastrophe.

Daisy Ridley’s Ava: A Woman Searching for Closure

At the center of the film is Ava, played by Daisy Ridley with remarkable restraint. Ava is an American whose husband was traveling in Tasmania when the disaster occurred. Presumed dead, his body has yet to be recovered. Desperate for some form of closure, Ava travels to Australia to join a volunteer corpse retrieval unit.

On paper, Ava is a familiar figure in post-apocalyptic storytelling: the grieving survivor clinging to a single purpose. What makes her compelling is how little the film overexplains her inner life. Ava speaks sparingly. Much of her emotional state is conveyed through Ridley’s face—wide-eyed, hollowed, constantly on the verge of tears that never quite fall.

Ridley’s performance is modest, controlled, and deeply human. There are no grand speeches, no overt emotional breakdowns designed to wring tears from the audience. Instead, we watch a woman moving forward because standing still would be unbearable.

Her goal is simple: find her husband’s body, even if it lies in a restricted zone still burning from the blast. But the film complicates that goal with a chilling question—what if he isn’t fully dead? Would that knowledge bring comfort, or something far worse?

A Hostile Landscape, Both Physical and Emotional

Ava’s presence in Tasmania is not warmly received. Anti-American resentment simmers beneath the surface, with many locals blaming the US military for the catastrophe. Ridley’s accent—occasionally uneven early on—becomes part of the character’s alienation. Ava is a foreigner in a grieving land, asking for help from people who have lost just as much, if not more.

Her only real ally is Clay, played by Brenton Thwaites, a brusque, rule-breaking volunteer who reluctantly agrees to help Ava venture beyond the sanctioned zones. Thwaites brings a grounded physicality to the role, serving as a practical counterweight to Ava’s emotional urgency.

Their relationship never becomes sentimental. It’s built on necessity, not trust, and that tension helps the film avoid sliding into cliché road-movie dynamics.

Zombies as Metaphor—But Not a Bludgeon

Zombie films have long used the undead as metaphor: for consumerism, pandemics, social collapse, dehumanization. In recent years, grief has become the dominant allegory, sometimes to exhausting effect. Words like “contemplative” and “mournful” are now almost default descriptors for any horror film that dares to slow down.

We Bury the Dead flirts with these clichés but never fully succumbs to them. Hilditch understands that grief doesn’t require constant solemnity to be taken seriously. The film allows moments of strange humor, visual beauty, and even bursts of tension that feel earned rather than obligatory.

There’s a standout sequence involving a grieving soldier and an unexpected dance—an odd, almost surreal moment that slides seamlessly from sadness into suspense. It’s one of the few scenes where the film’s tonal ambitions fully cohere.

Visual Storytelling Over Exposition

One of Hilditch’s greatest strengths here is his visual command. Tasmania’s natural landscapes are captured with striking beauty: scorched forests, open plains, and quiet suburban streets rendered eerie by their emptiness.

Despite its modest budget, We Bury the Dead often feels expansive. Hilditch uses wide shots and carefully composed frames to suggest a world far larger—and more broken—than what we see onscreen. Fire, smoke, and silence do much of the storytelling work.

This visual confidence stands in contrast to some of the film’s tonal inconsistencies. Quiet, reflective scenes are occasionally followed by needle-drop music cues or bursts of familiar zombie action that feel at odds with the film’s otherwise restrained approach.

Daisy Ridley’s Post-Star Wars Evolution

In many ways, We Bury the Dead represents the kind of project Daisy Ridley has quietly excelled at since stepping away from Star Wars. Her early attempts at multiplex stardom—most notably the ill-fated Chaos Walking—failed to capitalize on her strengths.

It’s in smaller, more character-driven films that Ridley truly shines. She was excellent as an anxious office worker in Sometimes I Think About Dying, and deeply unsettling in the underseen British thriller Magpie. Here, she once again proves her ability to elevate thinly sketched material through sheer emotional precision.

Ava is not richly written on the page, but Ridley gives her dimension. Her physical performance grows more forceful as circumstances worsen, while her facial expressions quietly convey the gnawing horror of realizing that some losses cannot be softened by answers.

Where the Film Falters

For all its strengths, We Bury the Dead does not entirely escape the gravitational pull of genre familiarity. As Ava’s journey approaches its conclusion, narrative momentum begins to wane. The final act poses questions about the undead and closure that feel underdeveloped—and, more problematically, already asked more effectively by other recent entries in the genre.

The finale, in particular, lacks the emotional or conceptual punch it seems to be reaching for. It gestures toward profundity without fully earning it, leaving the film to end on a note that feels muted rather than resonant.

This unevenness is emblematic of Hilditch’s career to date. He is a director with a strong visual sensibility—evident in 1922 and again here—but one who sometimes struggles to balance tone and pacing across an entire feature.

A Solid Entry in a Tired Genre

Still, context matters. The zombie genre is crowded with low-effort cash-ins, films that offer neither thrills nor ideas. Against that backdrop, We Bury the Dead feels refreshingly sincere.

It may not redefine the genre, but it approaches it with care, intelligence, and emotional honesty. It treats grief as something to be explored rather than exploited, and it trusts its audience to sit with discomfort rather than demanding constant stimulation.

Final Verdict

This MLWBD We Bury the Dead review ultimately finds the film to be a thoughtful, if imperfect, survival drama, elevated significantly by Daisy Ridley’s quietly powerful performance.

It doesn’t deliver the reinvention that zombie cinema arguably needs—but in a genre plagued by indifference and repetition, a film that tries this hard counts for something.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We Bury the Dead is out now in US cinemas, available to rent digitally in the UK, and releases in Australia on 5 February.