‘We Bury the Dead’ review: Half-dead, half-baked

There’s some potential and emotional potency in We Bury the Dead, but its weird tone and iffy rules keep it from coming to life.

It can be hard for an actor to escape Star Wars. Whether they play an all-powerful Jedi or a quirky droid, some performers spend the rest of their careers running from a galaxy far, far away. Daisy Ridley is no exception, as the British actress has been spemding her post-lightsaber days in a variety of different roles and genres. She dabbles in everything from indie dramas to Die Hard clones with middling levels of success. But, to her credit, it’s nice that Ridley is using her clout to try new things and star in projects that don’t have Disney’s marketing budget. But, like with any actor’s career, they can’t all soar like the Millennium Falcon.

We Bury the Dead follows Ava (Ridley), an American woman who volunteers to aid the people of Tasmania after a military experiment causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens. Even worse, some of those dead citizens come back to life and aimlessly roam the devastated towns. Ava has ulterior motives, as her husband was at a retreat in the southern part of the state when the experiment went wrong. With the help of a jaded local (Brenton Thwaites), Ava tries to evade military capture and the increasingly creepy corpses to find her husband amidst the wasteland.

Paradise lost.

Photo Credit: Vertical

The plethora of already-existing zombie apocalypse movies makes it hard for anyone to put their own stamp on the genre. The version writer/director Zak Hilditch (1922) comes up with is something closer to 28 Days Later; a somber aftermath of undead rampage with occasional metaphors to other themes. We Bury the Dead touches on grief, compassion, letting our loved ones go, and the true nature of man. All interesting angles for sure, but ones that were handled much better in projects like 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, I Am Legend, and even last year’s 28 Years Later. Even worse, none of those themes are particularly well-developed in We Bury the Dead and instead just fade in and out of the story without much flow.

There are moments where Hilditch and co. create grim atmospheres, but they’re few and far between. The montage of Ava searching houses, seeing how people died and what they left behind, is good at setting the movie’s overall tone. Sadly, it moves on from that aspect too quickly and barely revisits it later on. Ava then meets a soldier who lost his pregnant wife to the disaster and sees the mental anguish he deals with. Another powerful story element that, while resulting in the movie’s best and most tense scene, is merely a stop-gap on Ava’s journey. Even the zombie aspect of We Bury the Dead has weak rules (they start as vacant corpses and then can run by the movie’s end) and are never very scary. While having interesting ideas and setups, the movie’s drama and horror elements are sadly underdeveloped.

The ride of Ridley’s life.

Photo Credit: Vertical

It’s a testament to Ridley’s talents as an actor that even with a flawed script, at least she can meet expectations. She does fine work wearing Ava’s grief on her face throughout the movie while also amplifying the scarier moments. Ridley proves herself to be a solid dramatic actor when given her own monologues and reacting to the other characters that are either heartbroken or jaded from the end of their world. It’s a shame that the dialogue isn’t quite up to snuff because Ridley clearly has the chops to vocalize the complex emotions from the end of the world and make them tangible for an audience.

Thwaites, on the other hand, doesn’t even fit with a script as weak as We Bury the Dead. His long hair and laid-back machismo make you think the role is better suited for one of the Hemsworth brothers. He comes across like the comic relief, or at least someone bringing levity to a such a dour film. That intent doesn’t help, as Thwaites’ cool demeanor creates tonal whiplash every time he’s in a scene. Thankfully he’s in less than half of the movie’s 94-minute runtime, but it’s still a pretty bad miscalculation on Hilditch and Thwaites’ part.

The bottom line.

It’s unfair to say that We Bury the Dead is a complete loss. It has some neat inversions on the zombie apocalypse movie and uses it as a somewhat engaging metaphor for processing grief. Sadly, it’s not unique enough to rise above prior genre subversions, let alone make up for its own shaky screenplay. As for Ridley, she still has the acting chops to stand out in any good or bad movie she takes on. And best of all? She doesn’t even need the Skywalker name to get by.

We Bury the Dead is now playing in select theaters. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Vertical. Read more articles by Jon Winkler here.

Jon Winkler