Vertical, Umbrella Entertainment
Mild Spoiler Alert
Daisy Ridley is an actress who’s selective about the roles she takes on. Whether she’s carrying the weight of the Skywalker name or stepping into something far more grounded, her presence brings a quiet gravitas that helps sell the story. In We Bury the Dead, she plays Eva, a woman suspended between grief and hope, unsure whether to mourn her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan) or believe he might still be alive.
Mitch was working in Tasmania when an EMP device accidentally detonated. With communications crippled and information scarce, Eva fears the worst. As media coverage reveals the scale of the devastation and the number of lives lost, the only certainty she has is uncertainty.
Following protests and public outrage over military safety failures, a humanitarian cleanup effort is launched. The narrative notably avoids fully denouncing the country responsible, which feels deliberate, or possibly edited down. For the American volunteers who step forward, including Eva, the mission carries consequences. When she lands in a designated safety zone outside Hobart, it becomes clear that safety is a relative concept. Even the city itself sits at the edge of the destruction zone, and stability is fragile at best.
Whether Eva will find the man she loves is the emotional spine of the film. Despite signs that their relationship was already fraying, she still cares. What she reveals about Mitch’s work comes only in fragments. As for whether he was involved in any conspiracy, that’s not what this film is ultimately about. The ambiguity is deliberate, and those brief, half-formed explanations matter.
During her journey, Eva is paired with Clay (Brenton Thwaites), who brings his own motives into the mix. Together, they’re part of a taskforce assigned to locate the dead. Not all of them have passed on. Some still move. While not all are aggressive, their sudden charges, lingering presence, and clattering teeth are unsettling enough to raise goosebumps. The sound design deserves special praise. In blunt terms, they are zombies.
From an outside perspective, it’s difficult not to question the military logic at play. Allowing civilians to undertake such a dangerous mission feels dubious, to put it mildly. Sarcasm aside, for those searching for loved ones, the assignment offers the same desperate hope found in many post-apocalyptic narratives. Survivors cling to the belief that reunion is still possible. The unease lies in whether that hope is being exploited, and whether another motive is at work. Mitch’s role remains obscured, and by the time Eva nears answers, the film asks us to accept them with limited verification.
Placing a character like Eva in a story built around closure sets expectations early. She is remembering, and those flashbacks vividly tells all. And it’s that memory where the pain lives. Her grief, and her need to believe in something beyond loss echoes the emotional grounding that made the Disney-era Star Wars films work. There, she fought through uncertainty toward the light. We Bury the Dead is more concerned with survival and personal resolution than mythic balance.
Anyone expecting a George A. Romero–style zombie film will find something closer in tone to The Girl with All the Gifts (2016). This film isn’t interested in expanding its mythology or redefining the rules of the apocalypse. Instead, it narrows its focus to a single, uncomfortable question: when the dead still move, still react, still exist in some diminished form, what do we owe them, if anything at all? That’s Eva’s dilemma following after all the reveals.
Writer-director Zak Hilditch flirts with that moral dilemma but never lets it overtake the story’s true concern. This isn’t a film about the future of the undead or the shape of a new world. It’s about Eva, and the quiet devastation of accepting that some answers arrive too late to matter. Survival here isn’t heroic or triumphant. It’s personal. And sometimes, it means choosing to let go, even when hope refuses to die quietly. With this film, it’s more about how to bury the past to put aside the grief.. Afterwards, it becomes possible to look forward to a better future.
And that’s why the timing of this release if perfect on the first weekend of a New Years.
3½ Stars out of 5
We Bury the Dead Movie Trailer
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