[Nicolai P. Zwar]

We Bury the Dead (Zak Hilditch, 2025) (5/10)

I like movies from all kinds of genres, but I have always had a particular fable for Westerns and apocalyptical stories. They put people on the spot: no laws, no civilization, no higher court to call on… you’ve got to make your own choices and then you live with them. Or not… death is always right around the corner in these movies.

I was genuinely happy when 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead (my all time favorite “Zombie” movie) revived the zombie genre and dragged it out of the gore-soaked basements of 70s and early‑80s exploitation VHS movies to the feuilleton sections of respectable newspapers. Suddenly, the undead were not just chewing on limbs… it was the horror of the human behavior that was put under the magnifying glass. The Walking Dead, in its early seasons, was terrific television — some of the best written TV episodes ever were from that phase of the show — before it wandered off into its own wilderness and the final seasons became just meandering around the same tropes.

So here is another zombie movie, and if you want to do zombies again, you need a new angle. We Bury The Dead certainly tries. The zombies here are not immediately threatening. They are frightening by their mere presence. How would people react if the recently deceased simply got up and did… nothing? Just stood there, staring. That is a quietly horrifying idea, and the film leans into it for quite a long stretch before anything traditionally dangerous happens. Eventually, of course, even these zombies turn threatening, but that arrives in the second half… so if you’re hoping for “horror”… you’re in for a stretch.

The result is perhaps the most contemplative and mournful zombie film I have seen, more elegy than horror. It is an interesting idea, though not entirely successful, and certainly not convincing enough to carry the whole premise. There are creepy scenes in the later half, and the actors are uniformly strong. It is nice to see Daisy Ridley in a more fleshed-out lead role than she ever got in the Star Wars franchise, where she mostly had to look determined while stuff happend around her.

But overall, We Bury the Dead tries to be both spooky and meaningful, and ends up falling short on both fronts. Not disastrously so… just enough that you walk away thinking: well, that was fine for ninety minutes, but not something to write home about. A decent watch, not a must see. Skip or watch as you see fit.