Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead brings clever contributions to fourth wave zombie cinema

Courtesy Vertical

Set in the aftermath of a mass-death event that leaves bodies piling up faster than answers, Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead follows characters tasked with the unglamorous work of cleaning up the mess of mortality. This is not apocalypse as adrenaline; it’s apocalypse as municipal failure. Arriving in an era of American infrastructure collapse, isolationism, and languid leadership, a parable about brain-dead tragedy… hits different.

Hilditch, whose previous films (1922, These Final Hours) have a knack for pairing dread with moral rot, once again favors atmosphere over incident. The dead are everywhere, but the real weight of the film comes from the living—exhausted, emotionally hollowed-out, and unsure whether survival is still a meaningful metric.

For the zombie genre, this flick treads into a few new ideas that pair nicely to a deliberately uneven structure and tone—shambling forward and sometimes stopping entirely, keeping the audience guessing at each next step.

The United States accidentally deploys an experimental weapon of mass destruction off Australia’s southern coast. The large-scale EMP has caused up to half a million people to drop dead—and all living beings from fish and insects up to family pets. An international, volunteer body retrieval mission ensues, for which an American woman, Ava Newman (Daisy Ridley), travels to Tasmania in the hopes of finding her visiting husband Mitch (Matt Whelan), or whatever version of him that may have survived. Paired up with local man’s man Clay (Brenton Thwaites), Ava is responsible for collecting people’s week-old corpses from their homes and alerting nearby soldiers if any of them show signs of “life.”

Whatever wave of zombie cinema we’re currently in (I’m calling it fourth wave because I have some vague defining features but we don’t need to dabble today) it settles nicely between Danny Boyle’s increasingly video game action antics in 28 Years Later and the crushing sadness of last year’s Norweigan drama Handling the Undead, where dead peopple return to their families and do little more than sit at the dining room table, being dead.

We Bury the Dead’s focus on burial as a mass infrastructure endeavor creates an intriguing amount of whiplash approaches to the localized apocalypse at hand. Some are silently dealing with the loss of their own families, while others are having more of a Habitat for Humanity work project day. The massive undertaking of going building by building across a country does require a can-do spirits, but those that delight in the work are only making this worse for the first type of volunteer. Adding to the day-to-day discomfort, Ava is one of the only Americans allowed to take part in the clean-up efforts, and no one here is particularly stoked to hear the accent from the country that fucked this all up in the first place.

Courtesy Vertical

A confluence of events result in Ava deciding to break through a blockade and make a road trip for her husband’s last known location. There is, of course, no hope that he’s still alive, and so the mysteries from act two onward dip heavily into what a few scattered survivors are hoping to achieve. There’s no pursuit of a cure, and we know the inciting idiotic incident, so we’re left cheering for a few characters who are lost and, at best, will find a type of closure that they can’t even describe.

I’ve given the film a few rewatches already, so take from the level of compliment it deserves. On the page, it comes off like this shouldn’t work, and the defiance of focusing on the, y’know, zombies might decrease the power of the zombie film. But the performances, pacing, choices, and cinematography mesh together to create—yes, I know, another horror movie about trauma—a stellar exception to the rules and expectations.

We Bury the Dead is playing in theaters now.