‘We Bury the Dead’ Review: Lurching Between the Familiar and the New

An electro-magnetic weapon is unintentionally triggered off the coast of Tasmania, immediately killing virtually everybody on the island. The deaths are mercifully fast, however they go away behind a hell of a multitude, so volunteers are recruited from round the world to assist recuperate the our bodies. Like a lot of those that join, Ava (Daisy Ridley) does so in the hope of monitoring somebody down: her husband, Mitch (Matt Whelan). Dreaming of discovering him alive whereas understanding that he’s virtually actually useless, she’s disturbed to be taught that, because of the odd aftereffects of the EMP, he might now be someplace in between.

Written and directed by Zak Hilditch, We Bury the Lifeless finds a comparatively contemporary method to the zombie movie. By staging the story as a sort of localized apocalypse, it remembers the Covid-19 pandemic extra powerfully than many films which have addressed the subject straight—that eerie dissonance the place the finish of the world in a single place is simply the morning information in one other. Ava’s work with the clean-up crew is horrifyingly mundane, with every day forcing her to confront an insufferable quantity of human loss, in addition to a sequence of annoying logistical challenges, like the way to respectfully transfer the bloated corpse of an particularly heavy individual.

The “respectful” half isn’t a giant concern to her co-worker Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a good-looking rascal who appears to have joined the physique restoration staff only for one thing to do. Ava shortly convinces him to journey along with her down right into a restricted a part of the island the place her husband had been staying. There’s one thing dreamlike and elegant in the scenes of them driving by way of Tasmania’s apocalyptic surroundings, strikingly photographed by Steve Annis, and it’s when the movie lets these pictures communicate for themselves that We Bury the Lifeless is at its strongest.

The undead present a surprisingly minor impediment to Ava and Clay’s journey. They’re an unsettling presence, because of some stellar make-up work and a tooth-grinding behavior accompanied by some viscerally disagreeable sound results, however for the most half they aren’t harmful and Hilditch’s movie not often deploys them as a menace or a soar scare. As a substitute, it makes use of the strolling useless to ruminate on loss and closure, and to ask a potent query about whether or not it’s crueler to be left with a husk of somebody you liked or with nothing in any respect.

All through, a sequence of flashbacks give us a glimpse into Ava and Mitch’s life collectively, slowly cluing us in to the points they have been having earlier than the catastrophe. There’s a transparent thematic function to this side of the movie, tying into its central concepts about the tragedy of sudden deaths and how a lot they go away unsaid, if clumsily so. The flashbacks, for one, dance round the supply of Ava and Mitch’s marital strife, concurrently revealing too little and an excessive amount of—dragging the secret out longer than any sense of thriller can maintain however then stepping on the reveal earlier than the precise finale, robbing the movie’s conclusion of its energy in the course of.

Early on their journey to search out Mitch, Ava and Clay meet a stranger named Riley (Mark Coles Smith). He appears keen to assist, however, as with so many beneficial strangers in zombie films, his motivations are quickly revealed to be a lot darker. From Clay’s sudden departure at this level to what Ava agrees to, there’s a sketchiness to this stretch of We Bury the Lifeless that cripples its sense of momentum. And in a chunk of pure unhealthy luck for a movie that works so arduous to do one thing new inside the zombie style, this subplot concludes with a second that will be fairly stunning had it not felt prefer it was ripped from 28 Years Later.

The extra docile zombies that Ava encounters throughout the movie typically present indicators of their previous selves, like there’s a full individual left someplace behind their deadened eyes, unable to achieve the floor. In the identical method, there’s a considerate zombie story with its personal distinctive character lurking someplace inside We Bury the Lifeless, however it’s overridden by the movie’s extra generic components, and that identification finally will get misplaced amongst the horde.