SXSW Review: ‘We Bury the Dead’ is a Meditative Zombie Movie about the Importance of Closure

In the wake of a horrific tragedy affecting a large group of people, one of the hardest parts can be not knowing. In the case of a disaster whose aftermath still poses a risk to those who weren’t present when it occurred, the public is often denied access and doesn’t always get information right away about specific casualties. Some people just won’t accept that and will do whatever they can to get to their loved ones, even if it puts them in significant danger. We Bury the Dead explores one woman’s relentlessness in getting to her husband when she knows that he’s almost certainly dead, or potentially worse.

An American testing accident has caused the immediate death of half a million people in Tasmania, Australia. Ava (Daisy Ridley) is very worried about her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan), who was on the island for a work retreat. As an American, she gets a compassionate exception to volunteer with the body retrieval unit, which travels from house to house finding bodies and bringing them outside to be picked up by a shovel loader truck. She and the other volunteers are also warned that the rumors are in fact true: some, but not all, of the bodies have been reanimating, at which point soldiers are signaled and promptly shoot them in the head to ensure that they’re really dead.

Zombie movies have been a phenomenon for decades, and this one doesn’t tread startling new ground. It doesn’t utter the word “zombie” at any point, but it’s very clear from how they move and look that it’s what they’re meant to be. Yet what’s not as certain is whether they do indeed pose a threat, since Ava’s first glimpse of one sees a man who is barely moving and looks scared, and, per her assessment, poses no threat to her. That’s not all that she gets to see, but it does seem that the military is prioritizing risk-mitigating over intellectual analysis of what these creatures are and why this is happening in only selective cases.

While this could be classified as a horror film and does contain a few instances of nightmare flashes and frightening chases, it’s much more of a mediation on what it means to find closure. There are things that Ava desperately wants to talk about with Mitch, and even though she knows that there’s no possible way that he could have survived, something about being in the same room as him and looking him in the eyes, dead as they may be, feels like it’s going to be therapeutic. Others she encounters express their own complicated feelings about those they’ve lost and their inability to let go.

In her post-Star Wars career, it’s great to see Ridley back at SXSW for the second year in a row following last year’s underrated Magpie. This film isn’t quite as clever or inventive as that one, but it does approach a classic concept from a slightly different angle. Ridley is good as ever, and given that she has few costars and many moments of silence where she engages only with the environment around him, she responds commendably to the challenge. Brenton Thwaites and Mark Coles Smith offer different interpretations of the living that help to contextualize Ava’s drive and perseverance.

A somber score from Chris Clark enables the film’s deliberate pacing to work to its advantage, showing the sprawling hopelessness of this destroyed landscape that isn’t representative of the world at large but, for those who have lost someone, may as well be everything. That’s far from uplifting, but this film’s title should give some indication that the most it can possibly offer is healing and not hope.

Movie Rating: 7/10