Daisy Ridley shifts into grief-stricken survivor mode in We Bury the Dead, an Australian zombie thriller that premieres January 2, 2026. Written and directed by Zak Hilditch (These Final Hours), this isn’t your typical undead action flick. It’s a meditation on loss wrapped inside a Tasmanian nightmare that asks questions most zombie films never bother with.
The Catastrophe That Changes Everything
We Bury the Dead opens with a wedding—always a sign something’s about to go sideways. Ava Newman (Ridley) watches her husband Mitch board a plane for a work trip to Tasmania, Australia. Romance. Hope. The future. Then: catastrophic military disaster.
An experimental weapon detonates accidentally over Tasmania, instantly vaporizing roughly 500,000 people. Including Mitch. The death toll dwarfs anything audiences typically experience in zombie narratives. This isn’t localized zombie outbreak. This is literal apocalypse on a continental scale.
Ava’s response seems genuinely delusional. Rather than grieve normally, she boards a plane herself to Tasmania to join a body retrieval unit. The reasoning: What if Mitch survived? What if he’s one of the reanimated corpses? What if he can be saved?
That’s not hope. That’s trauma response masquerading as hope.
The Body Retrieval Horror
Hilditch films Ava’s work with genuine disgust. Decomposing corpses. Bodily fluids. Smells that can’t be described without nausea. The body retrieval job is pure disgusting labor—unglamorous cleanup of catastrophe with neither recognition nor purpose. Colleagues seem unbothered. This is just Tuesday for them.
Brenton Thwaites (Titans, A Prayer Before Dawn) plays Clay, Ava’s partner in corpse cleanup. He’s got long hair, a ’70s-era mustache, and precisely zero interest in purpose or mission. He’s just here for loose cocaine and abandoned motorcycles. That casual nihilism contrasts perfectly against Ava’s desperate search for meaning.
Eventually Ava directly asks Clay to help her violate orders and venture into the forbidden zone—the area too contaminated even for body retrieval. That’s where Mitch’s resort supposedly sits. That’s where her irrational hope lives.
What Makes This Different
We Bury the Dead refuses traditional zombie entertainment. Jump scares exist but don’t dominate. Gore exists but never feels gratuitous. Instead, Hilditch focuses on psychological unraveling as Ava discovers uncomfortable truths about her marriage that existed long before the apocalypse.
The film uses flashbacks to show her marriage had “already curdled” before military disaster struck. That’s the real horror—Ava’s searching for someone she’d already been losing emotionally. She’s not desperately trying to save a beloved husband. She’s frantically seeking closure from relationship death that happened through apathy and distance.
That’s genuinely unsettling in ways traditional zombie chaos never achieves.
The Zombie Question
What remains unclear: what exactly happens when zombies bite/scratch humans? The film gestures toward questions about whether some reanimated corpses retain souls but never fully commits to exploring that philosophical territory. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it feels unfinished.
The Australian setting itself adds novelty. Tasmanian landscapes. Australian actors. The culture feels authentically Down Under rather than generic zombie backdrop. That regional specificity grounds the apocalypse in geography audiences might not immediately recognize from typical American zombie narratives.
Ridley’s Performance
Ridley doesn’t just play grief. She plays someone slowly acknowledging her grief might be misplaced. She plays someone confronting that the person she lost emotionally years ago may never have been worth this desperation. That’s mature character work most actors shy away from—playing someone whose journey involves realizing their motivation wasn’t noble, just desperate.
The Bizarre Ending
Critics describe We Bury the Dead’s conclusion as “wild, bizarre, and genuinely terrifying—setting up a sequel.” Without spoiling specifics, the ending suggests this might not be singular story but opening chapter in larger mythology. That raises interesting questions about zombie reanimation and resurrection that standard zombie fiction rarely explores.
Final Verdict
We Bury the Dead isn’t essential zombie cinema, but it’s genuinely interesting character drama wearing zombie-film wrapping. Daisy Ridley carries everything with career-best performance. It’s worth experiencing despite its unfinished conceptual edges.
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