We Bury the Dead (2026)

Note: technically, this movie was first released in 2024 for its World Premier at the Adelaide Film Festival. However, the global release of the film has been this year – 2026. So I have used 2026 as the date of release in this review.

A zombie film with restraint. Not a phrase you hear often, is it? But Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead manages exactly that, choosing introspection over entrails in a subgenre that typically measures success by the litres of blood. This Australian production takes familiar undead territory and does something unexpected with it: strips it back, keeps it human, lets it breathe. Does it always work? No. But the attempt itself deserves recognition.

The setup is efficient. An accidental American weapons detonation has turned Tasmania into a contaminated no-go zone. Ava (Daisy Ridley), an American physiotherapist, volunteers for body retrieval duty. She’s looking for her husband Mitch, who was visiting on business when the disaster hit. Only the dead aren’t cooperating with the whole ‘staying dead’ arrangement. They’re coming back, but not as the mindless flesh-eaters we’ve been trained to expect. Some show an unsettling awareness, driven by what appears to be unresolved emotional baggage. So Ava’s trek northward becomes two journeys at once: one through ruined landscapes, another through the wreckage of a marriage that was already in trouble before the apocalypse turned up uninvited.

Ridley shoulders nearly the entire runtime, and she does it well. There’s a discipline to her performance that I appreciate. She communicates grief, guilt, and determination without reaching for easy dramatic notes or overplaying her hand. Combined with cinematography that frames Tasmania’s devastation as something almost painfully beautiful, the result is a film where the emotional desolation matches the physical kind shot for shot.

The film’s gamble (positioning the undead as metaphors for regret and missed chances at reconciliation) is both its best idea and its biggest liability. A scene featuring a reanimated father digging graves for his family hits surprisingly hard, suggesting something meaningful about how we process loss through ritual. But the script never fully commits. It keeps one foot in conventional horror beats that feel obligatory rather than earned, and the tonal whiplash weakens both approaches.

The sound design earns its keep. The gnashing of the undead creates an auditory signature that lingers well after the credits. Practical effects stay grounded, never showing off, though anyone expecting wall-to-wall zombie mayhem will leave disappointed. The undead are scarce here, which is clearly deliberate but won’t please everyone.

Personal accountability runs through the film like a vein. Flashbacks reveal mutual infidelity: both Ava and Mitch betrayed their vows. Can that kind of damage be repaired when one party is deceased? Or was it already beyond repair before death entered the conversation? That question forms the film’s spine. The contamination spreading across Tasmania reads, at least to me, as an externalisation of the characters’ internal moral decay. Hilditch doesn’t labour the point, thankfully, trusting the audience to make connections.

But the film stumbles noticeably in its pacing. Momentum sags in places, and the zombie mythology stays frustratingly opaque. Maybe that vagueness is meant to feel ambiguous and artful. Maybe it’s just underdeveloped. Your interpretation will depend largely on how generous you’re feeling. The ending feels abrupt, like the film knew its emotional destination but hadn’t quite plotted the route properly.

Even so, Hilditch has made something that treats horror as more than jump scares and blood splatter. This is a film interested in irrevocable choices, words left unspoken, and whether redemption means anything when meaningful dialogue has become literally impossible. It repurposes zombie tropes as scaffolding for grief meditation, and succeeds more often than it fails on those terms.

We Bury the Dead won’t satisfy the crowd hunting for thrills or elaborate apocalypse mythology. But for viewers willing to meet it on its own melancholic wavelength, there’s substance here. The film seems to grasp that sometimes the real horror isn’t whether we survive the end times. It’s whether we deserve to.