MIFF 2025 Film Review - We Bury the Dead

Images courtesy of Common State.

Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead is a moody, slow-burning horror drama that leans into atmosphere and emotional weight over cheap thrills - and for the most part, it works. Anchored by a strong central performance from Daisy Ridley and bolstered by top-tier production design, the film delivers a grounded, tactile take on the undead that feels refreshingly intimate, even as it flirts with apocalyptic dread.

After the accidental deployment of a weapon of mass destruction, a large swath of Tasmania is left decimated and uninhabitable (or should I say, more uninhabitable), releasing an outbreak that reanimates the dead. The film follows Ava (Ridley), a grief-stricken woman who volunteers for a government-run recovery unit tasked with locating and burying the reanimated corpses of loved ones. Her motivation is personal: her fiancé, missing since the outbreak, is presumed to be among the shambling corpses. What begins as a grim duty quickly spirals into a psychological descent as Ava confronts not only the horrors of the undead, but the emotional wreckage of unresolved grief.

The film’s greatest strength lies in its production value. The practical makeup work on the flesh-eaters is outstanding - grotesque and detailed far beyond what I've seen in much bigger productions. These aren’t your typical shambling zombies; they’re uncanny, almost mournful figures, rendered with a level of detail that gives each encounter a level of personality. The effects team, led by Jason Baird of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, deserves serious credit for crafting creatures that manage to evoke both terror and tragedy.

Equally impressive is the sound design, which elevates the film’s tension considerably. From the low, guttural moans of the reanimated to the crunch of grinding teeth eager to bite, every sonic detail feels meticulously placed. The score, composed by Jed Kurzel, is sparse but effective - favouring ambient dread over melodic cues, and allowing silence to do much of the heavy lifting. In several key scenes, the absence of music amplifies the unease, letting the soundscape breathe and build organically.

Plot-wise, We Bury the Dead unfolds a little too quickly, with a slight 95 minutes not really giving the character beats time to breathe or be teased. Hilditch commands the camera in a manner that feels fresh and motivated when the story needs it, but the focus is on Ava’s emotional journey and the moral ambiguity of her mission. The recovery unit itself is portrayed with a kind of bureaucratic coldness - uniforms, protocols, and a chilling indifference to the humanity of the undead.

This restraint, among other things, can occasionally work against We Bury. Daisy Ridley’s character is an American, which means she’s forced to do a poor accent, likely to try and separate her from her role in the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy. On the narrative side, a subplot involving a fellow volunteer’s breakdown hints at deeper psychological themes but is dropped too quickly to resonate, and feels crammed in for the sake of obligatory human conflict.

By the time the third act arrives - with Ava finally confronting the possibility of her fiancé’s reanimation - the film hits its emotional stride. The ending is ambiguous but earned, leaving viewers with a lingering sense of unease and sorrow rather than catharsis. We Bury the Dead may not reinvent the genre, but it refines it with an admirable workman-like approach. It’s a quiet, mournful dystopia that favours emotional resonance over spectacle, and thanks to its stellar makeup effects and immersive sound design, it still manages to be a worthy addition to the usually stagnant - yet steadily growing - canon of post-human cinema.

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We Bury the Dead is screening as part of the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. For tickets and more info, click here.