January isn’t fairly as a lot of a film wasteland because it was 20 years in the past. January 2026, for instance, sees the mid-month launch of a extremely anticipated 28 Years Later sequel, and later within the month, there’s a new Sam Raimi thriller starring Rachel McAdams. However when the primary Friday in January falls particularly early within the month, because it does this yr, that weekend stays comparatively barren. It’s solely acceptable, then, that one of many only a few new motion pictures releasing on Jan. 2 is We Bury the Lifeless, a horror drama that performs a bit like an acoustic cowl of a 28 Days Later-style zombie-sociology thriller.
Actually, We Bury the Lifeless might characteristic the least panicked depiction of a zombie outbreak this facet of The Lifeless Don’t Die, albeit in a mournful context. A U.S. army experiment gone awry has set off some sort of EMP bomb off the coast of Tasmania, immediately killing everybody on the island. Counted among the many 500,000 lifeless is Mitch (Matt Whelan), who was visiting for work. The film joins his spouse Ava (Daisy Ridley) on her solution to volunteer for a staggering and quietly grotesque mission: serving to to wash up these half 1,000,000 lifeless our bodies. Like numerous the volunteers, Ava has an ulterior motive, hoping in opposition to hope that she would possibly truly discover Mitch in a extra animated state.
The presence of zombies shouldn’t be a revelation to any of the characters. Rumors about a number of the lifeless coming again to life are calmly confirmed at Ava’s orientation, when volunteers are informed to not panic in the event that they encounter a reanimated physique. Navy personnel will maintain it “humanely,” and there have not been reviews of any actual hazard. The zombie drawback is mentioned upfront partially to discourage volunteers from searching for out their family members. Ava doesn’t heed any of those warnings. She and her assigned work companion, the extra cavalier Riley (Mark Coles Smith), should circumvent the army to enterprise additional south.
Alongside the best way, they do encounter zombies, in scenes that writer-director Zak Hilditch orchestrates extra for thriller than pure suspense. Hilditch doesn’t remove horror completely: there are some shiver-inducing moments when the undead quietly seem within the background or distance of a body, and frequent overhead photographs surveying the eerily desolate landscapes are elegant of their unease. The film additionally has a memorably gnarly recurring sound impact: not seeming to know their very own jaw energy and bodily weak spot, the zombies gnash their tooth till they crunch in their very own mouths like cereal items.
We Bury the Lifeless doesn’t deal within the white-knuckle immediacy that many viewers affiliate with 28 Days Later and different fashionable zombie motion pictures, the place the undead are likely to appear to be rampaging hordes (whether or not they’re historically slow-moving or sped up into terrifying sprints). In We Bury the Lifeless, the dwelling characters appear to know the outbreak higher than the victims of it, who typically haven’t but gathered into intimidating crowds and don’t present the animalistic instincts of their counterparts in different movies.
But that doesn’t put Ava on agency footing. She’s informed the undead are principally flukes that have to be corrected, and the zombies she meets throughout her travels don’t provide a lot encouragement a couple of potential reconnection with Mitch. At finest, their consciousness seems foggy; at worst, flashes of aggression start to emerge, as any scholar of horror would possibly anticipate. Nonetheless, Ava presses ahead, unable to totally settle for the tragedy with out staring it within the face, particularly after listening to that the reanimated corpses are extra doubtless the victims with “unfinished enterprise.” That is an outline extra usually utilized to ghosts than zombies, and We Bury the Lifeless has an appropriately haunted high quality.
By means of Ava, Hilditch seems to be questioning what motivates the existence of so many zombie motion pictures within the first place. He doesn’t appear uninterested within the style, however, as with the filmmakers behind the latest 28 Years Later, he’s assured the zombie film can accommodate a stunning diploma of quiet reflection. We Bury the Lifeless isn’t as boldly stylized as both of Danny Boyle’s forays into zombieland, nevertheless it does profit from location capturing, the regular readability of Hilditch’s compositions, and Ridley’s haunted but decided efficiency. Ridley has develop into a face of resilience in her Star Wars motion pictures in addition to extra disparate movies like Younger Girl and the Sea and The Marsh King’s Daughter. Right here, that resolve hardens into one thing extra cussed, whereas she lets slip hints of a larger vulnerability.
The place that leads Ava is slightly irritating. In its means, We Bury the Lifeless leaves off simply as mysteriously and abruptly as 28 Years Later, with out the promise of an instantaneous follow-up to additional develop its weirder and extra compelling concepts. (It additionally ends with an idea strikingly much like one from considerably earlier in Boyle’s movie.) On the similar time, there’s one thing interesting concerning the film’s final modesty and its refusal to push additional into its fictional world’s new zombie period. Hilditch isn’t pitching a big-canvas apocalypse. Like Ava, he’s analyzing items of a possible catastrophe, and contemplating what it’d imply for our broader humanity, searching for a brand new perspective for a brand new yr.
