Film Review: WE BURY THE DEAD (2024): Daisy Ridley Can’t Save a Dull Zombie Movie That Never Really Gets Moving

We Bury the Dead Review

We Bury the Dead (2024) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Zak Hilditch and starring Daisy Ridley, Brenton Thwaites, Mark Coles Smith, Matt Whelan, Chloe Hurst, Kym Jackson, Deanna Cooney, Salme Geransar, Elijah Williams, Luke Jai, Megan Hollier, David Genat and Matthew Parkin.

Zak Hilditch’s disappointing zombie movie, We Bury the Dead, finds itself in an unusual dilemma. A zombie film chock full of action can get away with little to no solid characterizations in some circumstances. We Bury the Dead has minimal action, though, and a lot of depth in its characterizations, particular in terms of the writing of the main female character, Ava (Daisy Ridley). It all spirals downward when we learn a secret about Ava and her husband (Matt Whelan) who she embarks on a search for as the film begins. Would it be fair to give away the secret in a review like this? Probably not, so I won’t reveal it. It is easy to say that the surprise takes the movie down several notches from simply being a boring zombie movie to becoming an unlikable one.

It’s a shame because Ridley is one of our most compelling actresses. She made Young Woman and the Sea, one of the most highly regarded Disney movies of all-time despite its middling box-office take and the fact that it was ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. To see Ridley play a woman like Ava frustrated me. Ridley shows range in the new role, but the fact that her character seeks out her husband in the middle of extreme circumstances feel a bit implausible given the movie’s secret plot’s agenda.

We Bury the Dead opens strongly as 500,000 lives are affected due to a military disaster in Tasmania. Ridley is so good in her role, we initially believe she’d volunteer to help deal with the chaos by entering into the affected area. Ava is informed she can’t enter into the husband who is in the middle of the tragedy’s territory. Not for a while anyway. The husband is either dead or his brain has been impacted, but Ava seemingly wants to get to him, for whatever reason. That’s where the movie makes its central mistake because what comes later on seems to make Ava’s choices feel insincere and all wrong.

Zombies enter into the equation in We Bury the Dead. The stale gimmick here is that the zombies make clicking noises with their jaws that sound like they’ve come straight from the Ari Aster movie, Hereditary. That clicking noise is creepy. However, it gets frustrating when it’s the scariest part of a horror movie that should at least try to live up to Night of the Living Dead if it stands a chance at success. Hilditch doesn’t go for a conventional zombie movie and the approach he takes isn’t a successful one by any traditional measure.

We meet a tattooed, good-looking guy named Clay (Brenton Thwaites) who has an unusual bond with Ava over the course of the movie. Tossed into the equation is a soldier named Riley (Mark Coles Smith) who has an intriguing dilemma that makes him the most interesting character in the movie. Smith and Thwaites don’t falter in their roles. On the contrary, they keep the movie interesting in-between zombie appearances and attacks. Clay initially seems as if he could be a love interest for Ava, but luckily, there isn’t much romance in the movie. It may have spiced things up a bit if there was a genuine romance here, but the new horror film has an entirely different idea in mind.

That aforementioned secret ruins the whole movie. Ridley becomes more unlikable as a result and the closing shot sort of redeems her for her troublesome past, but it’s an example of too little, too late. Those ideas that We Bury the Dead flirts with at the end are reminiscent of themes from 28 Years Later, a far superior film to this new movie which is pretty much flat from a story line perspective, almost from beginning to end. I’d love to dig more into specifics, but this movie just opened in theaters and people may complain.

We Bury the Dead showcases Daisy Ridley doing her best to make the audience keep from getting bored. She’s fierce, determined and vulnerable. When we learn what motivates her, though, it almost makes us want to see the zombies help end her depression for her. Ava takes risks that nobody in her predicament would want to take and that undermines the integrity of the movie.

That clicking noise the zombies make is certainly creepy enough (even if Hereditary should trademark the idea of clicking noises in horror movies), but the scariest thing about We Bury the Dead is that it has little respect for the audience which would embrace this movie with open arms. The ending is a signature cop-out, but the movie loses the audience way before that with reveals that constantly disappoint and make the movie barely worth watching.

Rating: 5/10

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