-(1).jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&crop=3%3A2)
Horror’s most consistent monsters are always shapeshifting to match the anxieties of the age that birthed them. The zombie shambled out from Haitian folklore, dragging the fear of being enslaved even after the release of death behind them. George A. Romero's violent ghouls in Night of the Living Dead rummaged around in the guts of America’s feelings about the Vietnam War. Dawn of the Dead fretted over capitalism turning us into mindless consumers.
The decomposing revenants that Daisy Ridley encounters in We Bury The Dead are brand new to the genre, and all the fresher for it. The setting is new, too. Aesthetically, it’s Aussie director Zak Hilditch’s strange, sad and spooky love letter to the wild landscapes of Tasmania, where the action is set. Lingering drone shots of people moving through a freshly uninhabited world are stunning. It would almost be a tourism advert, if not for the horrifying happenings on display when you get up close.
The Star Wars alumnus plays Ava, an American physiotherapist who has volunteered for body retrieval duty on the island state. She’s not particularly welcome, given the Yanks are responsible for this mess. An experimental EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapons test by the US military has misfired off the coast, instantly wiping out its organic inhabitants, human and animal. Their brains have been turned off in an instant.
-2.jpeg)
This makes for a very satisfying contemporary zombie-apocalypse set-up. There’s no debate about how fast society would break down in an outbreak scenario; it was decimated wholesale in an instant. The power is down, meaning the volunteers have to clear each home of bodies by torchlight. Usually, this is a contrivance, but the frightening atmosphere in darkened rooms is genuine and earned.
Ava is one of many tasked with manually transporting corpses onto the roadside for formal identification and burial, equipped with only her torch and wildly inadequate PPE mask and gloves (unless the EMP took out all insect life too, surely the decay alone would be a biohazard). Plus a flare, should they come across one of the dead who has come “back online”, to call in the cavalry for a quick headshot. Poignant moments of disaster recovery ethos are here, too, as a Christian priest and a Buddhist monk both pray over the bodies.
Those who return are docile, their military minders assure them. Which, to the seasoned zombie-flick appreciator, foreshadows that they obviously won’t be docile for long. Ava, however, appears to come from a world without horror tropes. When she does encounter the returned, she disregards all survival instinct to approach them and observe their awful dead eyes and gnarly grinding teeth. Give the foley artist a raise – that chittering sound will haunt your nightmares.
-(1).jpg)
Why do only some people return to this grim simulacrum of life? Perhaps because they have “unfinished business,” suggests one character. Ava also has unfinished business in the form of a nasty cocktail of grief and guilt over her missing-presumed-dead, potentially estranged husband. He was on a work retreat on the south coast when the incident happened, and Ava needs to give the soldiers the slip and venture some 200 miles to find out if he’s one of the returned. Nobody is allowed south of Hobart, however, because the city is on fire.
Ava finds an unlikely conspirator in Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a handsome tradie who initially comes off as a huge jackass. There’s a hilarious scene where the pair stumble on a secret bogan motorcycle gang sex dungeon, with corpses arranged in a tableau of debauchery. Clay’s first response is to take a big snort of the pile of drugs left on the side. Not the most sensible decision, but more situationally aware than Ava, who gets far too close to a dead sex worker who has suddenly become ambulatory and seems... angry.
A shiny motorcycle is all it takes to get Clay on board with Ava’s not-so-magical road trip, which obviously does not go according to plan. In the process, they stumble across Riley (Mark Coles Smith), a military man with mysterious and ultimately macabre motivations. “The real horror is the humans,” is a theme already richly explored by the 28 Days Later franchise and HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us, but it’s a classic for a reason. Coles Smith gives an incredible performance as a man driven to madness by grief, striking fear into the audience’s guts while engendering sympathy.
-5-(1).jpg)
Unfortunately, his character is far more richly drawn than Ava’s. Ridley makes a valiant effort, but her character has little to do beyond looking sad, or scared, or both. Her job is made trickier by a story that can’t decide if it’s an adrenaline-spiking horror or a more meditative speculative fiction work using the undead as a vessel for exploring how the living can move forward after loss. The latter is a timely subject, given the scale of death and disaster we are currently living through, with the trauma of the pandemic barely in the rearview mirror. But horror junkies who want endless high-stakes chase sequences may be left cold, and without the fear of transmission, the stakes are ultimately lower.
In many ways, this is more of a ghost story. Only, the ghosts are corporeal corpses with gnashing teeth. Unfortunately, the fascinating ideas Hilditch is percolating get entirely boiled away by an absolute stinker of a final scene that undercuts all internal logic and everything the film has been working towards emotionally. If you turned it off five minutes before the credits roll, this would be a solid four-star movie.
Streaming on Amazon, Apple and Sky
