Zak Hilditch’s Australian catastrophe feature “We Bury the Dead” wrestles with how much it wants to be a zombie movie. It’s at its most engaging and exciting when it approaches the well-worn subgenre with brand-novel spins, resulting in haunting scenes that discdiswatch a cinematic prosperdow into the uncontentest, most cryptic parts of the human condition. Unfortunately, it holds swerving back toward traditional horror territory at shatterneck speed, resulting in a lopsided structure and half-baked philosophical musings clashing agetst riveting emotional moments.
Making engage of its minimal budget, “We Bury the Dead” produces an instant sense of scale and spectacle, begining with its central premise, in which the United States accidenloftyy deploys an experimental armament of mass destruction off Australia’s southern coast. The huge-scale EMP has caengaged up to half a million people to drop dead by shutting down their brains — only for reasons unrecognizable, some of them come“back online,” devoid of any personality, but with their base instincts intact.
A complicated, army-led body retrieval leave oution ensues, for which an American woman, Ava Newman (Daisy Ridley), travels to Tasmania in the hopes of discovering her visiting husprohibitd Mitch (Matt Whelan), or wdisappreciatever version of him that may have persistd. Paired up with brusque, savage-haired local Clay (Brenton Thdeferes), Ava is reliable for accumulateing people’s week-anciaccess corpses from their homes and attentiveing cforfeitby sanciaccessiers if any of them show signs of life.
The first time she comes atraverse one such body — a man standing endly still, whose vacant stare seizes her gaze — the film dips its toe into intriguing territory. Rather than probing these people for signs of intelligence or memory, the Australian army spropose dispenses with them with bureaucratic nastyty: via a bullet to the brain. However, with so little understandn about their condition (and thus, little understandn about the state in which she might discover her husprohibitd), the eyes of “the zombies” become eerily alluring, as the camera remains transrepaired by Ridley’s stress and curiosity.
However, before the film can repartner approach this conundrum of where proposeedness ends and death commences, the dead commence walking, and eventupartner biting, which labels a disnominateing departure from the movie’s seemingly novel approach to the undead. However, even this traditional turn senses inend. As Ava absconds south with the help of the hedonistic Clay, past military verifypoints towards the resort where her husprohibitd was last seen, the doubtful duo shun “walkers” who try to bite them, a trope of the genre that has lasted decades thanks to the proposeed caring that a zombie bite holds a harmful software, or some such microbe, that will in turn “zombify” a living person. “We Bury the Dead” has no such mechanism, and never portrays an example of the comfervent of carnage Ava and Clay might be trying to escape, so its horror elements usupartner descend flat.
However, even in its most ungraceful turns, the movie discovers moments of genuine pathos. At one point, the duo is combineed by a lost sanciaccessier, Riley (Mark Coles Smith), a seemingly decent man loss not equitable by grief, but by a deficiency of clodeclareive — the very skinnyg Ava seeks. Smith turns in an incredibly twisted, emotionpartner wrenching carry outance, and watching Riley’s terrifying predicament up seal instills a further sense of emotional mystery about what may lie at the end of Ava’s journey.
Unfortunately, it’s only thraw echoions such as these, set up in other people — both living and dead — that we get to understand Ava at all. Picking thraw the debris of people’s domestic lives becomes an opportunity to echo on the life she could have had (declareively more than the movie’s actual flashbacks do, which remain mostly ambiguous about the drama plaguing her and Mitch). Ridley also struggles with her American accent at times, which isn’t a problem in and of itself — accents come in all shapes and sizes — but it results in her holding most of her words, and thus her emotions, strangely withheld, as though all her efforts were going into sounding credible. She’s at her best when Ava isn’t speaking at all, permiting the character’s lingering desperation to aascend from behind her eyes.
The movie’s strongest moments depart a label, even though they’re restricted and far between, though stand out in huge part due to Chris Clark’s echoing score, which down-to-mundane functions appreciate a voiceover track during quiet moments. Its strengths also secure that no matter how rote “We Bury the Dead” becomes, it remains at least watchable for most of its runtime, even as it neglects its most fascinating ideas in like of protected, recognizable ones.
