Australian apocalypse cinema has turned up some excellent examples over the past decade or so; that’s even without naming a certain franchise, itself named for a certain seminal character, which re-emerged in 2015. These Final Hours (2013) – which I now realise I reviewed a decade ago at the same festival – places modern Australia under the quite literal shadow of an incoming asteroid and allows us to watch society straining and collapsing under the weight of certain annihilation. Then we’ve had films like Wyrmwood (2014) and Cargo (2017), which have each dealt in varying degrees with personal interest stories and – well, zombies, in the case of Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead. These are movie monsters which still crop up in genre cinema reasonably regularly. However, more and more, we get different spins on the zombie genre: films are more inclined to examine the emotional impact of the resurrecting dead, rather than simply pitching them against the living.
This brings us to We Bury The Dead (2024), which perhaps takes some elements from the aforementioned films and central ideas, but spins them into something rather unusual and innovative. The promo for the film seemingly can’t help itself but to represent its zombies as sinister hunters (just look at the blurb on IMDb); this is a bit of a mistake, as this is only a small part of the peril at play in the film. People expecting the Dawn of the Dead remake will be disappointed; this is something else almost entirely, and it works well on its own, far quieter merits.
The premise is this: something world-changing and significant has taken place in Tasmania. An experimental American weapon has been accidentally detonated (the sort of deadly incompetence which feels entirely plausible nowadays), leading to the instantaneous deaths of thousands of civilians. Society is endeavouring to bounce back, but to do this, it needs to deal with the hidden gruntwork intrinsic to keeping calm and carrying on. Whilst parts of Tasmania continue to burn, the military are going in to retrieve the dead – hopefully to identify them, and to dispose of them. Ava (Daisy Ridley) has enlisted as a civilian volunteer, using her medical expertise for the purpose of body retrieval. However, she has an ulterior motive, as no doubt many of the people who have also enlisted do. Why else would anyone want to do this thing otherwise? Ava has lost track of her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan), who prior to the disaster had gone to a Tasmanian resort for his work. Expecting the worst, Ava nonetheless feels she owes it both of them to find out what happened to him.
In one of the film’s perhaps less plausible moments of character development, Ava ends up buddying up with the rather intractable, gung-ho Clay (Brendon Thwaites), who seems strangely unconcerned by the work at hand. As they work, with the film spending a great deal of time showing us family photos on the walls of houses now filled with dead bodies, Clay seems to think nothing of just grabbing a corpse by its ankles and heaving it out into the street; Ava is at first repelled by this, but perhaps she admires something of his approach. Still, they bond just enough for Ava to convince Clay to help her, so they abandon their official duties to travel the 200 kilometres to the resort – on a motorbike, to get it done quickly and to evade notice.
Snag. Or, another snag. There are many snags here. Not only are large parts of the route blocked off with crashed vehicles (the weapon killed people instantaneously), and not only are parts of the island impassable due to debris, smoke and flame, but in some circumstances, the dead are getting up and walking. The military are aware of this, but are quite confidently dealing with it: they believe most of the dead to be ‘docile’, and easily dispatched. Certainly, at least at first, this seems to be the case: the dead are seemingly more interested in pondering their own condition, though become more erratic and even a little self-harming as time moves on. However, out on their own, Ava and Clay can’t rely on the military and the agreed system of dispatch. And, as their journey progresses and they begin to encounter a more varied bunch of the resurrected dead, we glean more and more about each key character’s real backstories and motivations.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that the longer certain movie monsters have been around, the more filmmakers will want to experiment with the known characteristics of that monster: just as we have had ‘vegetarian vampires’ and the like, so we now have a number of zombie flicks where the zombies (and let’s stick with that term for convenience) don’t simply hate the living, or want to infect them, or to eat their brains and so on. In We Bury the Dead, the zombies can and do choose to pursue the living, and it’s definitely alarming when they do, but it seems to be borne out of desperation and a kind of sadness, rather than a simple impulse to infect/kill/eat. This isn’t, however, as quiet a film as the likes of Handling the Undead (2024) with its almost entirely harmless undead (unless you’re a rabbit). There are the more expected, increasing moments of peril in We Bury the Dead, and some of the undead tableaux in the film are phenomenal, absolutely worthy of Romero at his best. We also get, arguably, a few tributes to other well-known canonical films, too.
But all of this would be moot without interesting living characters; thankfully Daisy Ridley, the lead, does very well with her role, and the fact that this is a film not overloaded with dialogue or exposition works to her favour. We gradually get the sense that the catastrophic event may have had a huge impact in terms of scale and impact, but far smaller stories carry equal emotional weight here, and that eventually goes for Clay, too. These are characters you care about, and flashbacks are used sparingly, but effectively to flesh them out, giving a sense of motivations which go beyond those originally stated. There are a few gaps in narrative cogency in places, and the determination of filmmakers to sacrifice some plot coherence for some identikit warm, fluffy moments will always raise an eyebrow, but all in all We Bury the Dead is a well-paced progression through personal and international disasters, carefully piecing together just a couple of the sad stories which you just know are here, against a backdrop of something still barely understood and dreadful. It’s a thoughtful, considered approach which may not suit all audiences, but has a great deal to offer to anyone who can stand something a little different.
We Bury the Dead (2024) was this year’s secret film at the Celluloid Screams Film Festival.