Fifteen years ago “Monsters” took SXSW by storm, launching the career of Gareth Edwards with a backstory that rivaled the one on screen when the director did all of its effects shots by himself, convincingly surrounding a pair of humans roaming around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by gargantuan octopus-like creatures. The VFX were impressive, but they were sold by a story that required them minimally to create tension and it looked as if it were made for at least 100 times its $500,000 budget. Writer/director Zak Hilditch clearly had more money to throw at his latest feature “We Bury the Dead” when it has a bonafide movie star in Daisy Ridley to be the face of it, but there was a pleasant feeling of deja vu being back in Austin for the premiere of the resourceful zombie thriller that plays big with a relatively slender and shrewdly conceived central narrative.
The worst has seemingly already happened at the start of “We Bury the Dead” when a nuclear catastrophe has rocked Australia, but when there’s countless casualties, the hope that some remain alive continues to torture those with loved ones in the country. With its genre underpinnings, It can safely be expected that Ava (Ridley) will discover that her husband may not exactly be either alive or dead after he went on a work retreat off the coast of Tanzania as news reports surfaced that there are unusual signs of life in the region. However, what’s less anticipated is how Hilditch gets to that potential confrontation when acknowledging that no government could possibly handle the fallout without some sort of public assistance effort and Ava cleverly works out that she can find her way into the toxic region by volunteering for cleanup duty, collecting and identifying corpses. (It’s also seemingly a sign of a new era that America is cited as being responsible for the errant missile test that led to such destruction rather than traditional villains such as Russia or China.)
Such tasks aren’t for everybody as early partners of Ava’s will throw up or simply be overcome with grief as they search houses for bodies, but her ulterior motive gives her a resolve to get through with the grisly business and she’s paired soon enough with Clay (Brenton Thwaites), who actually looks to enjoy making sure the corpses have no pulse. His love for motorcycles becomes Ava’s ticket to the resort where her husband was last seen, unfortunately located in the most toxic zone that remains off-limits to most, but the two go off-roading and seem to find common cause with a soldier (Mark Coles Smith) who should apprehend them, but has a late wife of his own on his mind. Things get weird from there, not the least of which is the deceased creeping back to life, but the zombies never are presented as the most dangerous threat to the trio, who instead could be eaten alive by the memories that won’t allow them to move on without some definitive answer as to whether their loved ones are dead.
Ridley, who has minimal dialogue throughout, does remarkable work often with her eyes alone, projecting the kind of wounded stoicism that landed her the lead in “Star Wars,” but gets more room here to settle in as an imperceptible sense of loss can’t help but start to break through to the surface. It’s an epic performance that fits with what Hilditch is able to set up so succinctly in the film’s opening minutes where a few brief timelapse scenes give the scope of the tragedy that Ava is merely one of thousands trying to navigate and subsequently allows the director to pick his spots to hint at the bigger picture, never feeling less immense than its grand widescreen framing despite not usually having more than a character or two in any given scene. The film can seem slightly familiar when no one is to be trusted and calcified corpses spring up at particularly inopportune moments as Ava and Clay investigate one haunted house after another, but Hilditch keeps audiences guessing about what’s around the corner in other ways when people can turn out to be someone different than they appear well ahead of becoming a zombie and any time things threaten to become too solemn, there’s a nice burst of gallows humor to break it up. Digging a little deeper than most of its ilk, “We Bury the Dead” finds that breaking the rules can have its rewards.
“We Bury the Dead” does not yet have U.S. distribution.