REVIEW: WE BURY THE DEAD (2025)

 By Stephen Pytak

Since her breakout role in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015), Daisy Ridley has continued working steadily before the camera, struggling to prove she is truly a force to be reckoned with.

After seeing her doing her best with what she was given to work with in Episodes VIII and IX, the English actress found a few interesting opportunities.

They included her work in Magpie (2024) and Young Woman and the Sea (2024), Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) and The Eagle Huntress (2016).

In 2025, she played the lead in a post-apocalyptic film in which she has a few run-ins with some animated corpses.

Called We Bury the Dead, it's more arthouse fare than splatterfest. 

That doesn't mean you can't watch it in a marathon with films like Jean Rollin's The Night of the Hunted (1980) or George A. Romero's Day of the Dead (1985).

Actually, it would fit nicely sandwiched between those two films.

But the filmmakers seem to be more concerned with their characters and how they choose to deal with the overwhelming crisis they're facing.

And Daisy Ridley gives it everything she's got.

She and director Zak Hilditch - who made 1922 in 2017 - take us on a very interesting journey. Sure. It's downbeat. But there's always something curious around the corner. And it's not a rehash of something we've seen before.

We Bury the Dead (2025) does its own thing.

Daisy Ridley in "We Bury the Dead (2025)." Copyright 2025 by VERTICAL.

The plot feels all too real.

I could imagine something like this happening in the here and now.

We Bury the Dead (2025), as far as I can recall, doesn't tell the audience when it takes place, unlike Mad Max (1979) which straight up tells the audience right away that it takes place "A FEW YEARS FROM NOW..." 

But it obviously takes place in modern times.

The United States has accidentally detonated an experimental weapon off the coast of Tasmania, an island state of Australia, about 150 miles south of the Australian mainland.

Boom!

The capitol, a city called Hobart, is destroyed. And many people in the vicinity not killed in the blast zone are reportedly brain dead.

However, some of those brain dead victims have regained motor function. Some walk around. Some grind their teeth. And some become predators, hunting anything that moves.

Daisy plays an American named "Ava." Her husband, "Mitch (actor Matt Whelan)," was on a business trip in the zone at the time of the explosion, staying at a place called Woodbridge.

Determined to find him, dead or alive...or undead, "Ava" travels to the island, becomes a volunteer with a body retrieval unit and finds a friend with a motorcycle who promises to give her a lift down into the heart of darkness.

There's a lot of things I like about We Bury the Dead (2025).

Ava's harrowing journey through a wasteland is made up of a series of carefully crafted vignettes.

I'd like to think of this film as more of a post-apocalyptic film than a zombie movie. I mean everyone in it has been affected somehow by this devastating tragedy. 

And the living dead we run into aren't all the same.

Sure, many of them like to grind their teeth and shamble around.

But they're not like the insect like hoards you see in World War Z (2013). They not praying to the same god. They don't have a hive mind. 

They're individuals. And some have traces of their humanity intact.

Ava runs into a few different types. 

One just stands in the darkness to watch her go by.

Another encourages her to help him bury the remains of his family before ending his misery with a blow to the head with a trusty shovel.

And one is akin to the first zombie we see in Night of the Comet (1984), the one who chases Catherine Mary Stewart outside of the movie house.

He chases Ava through an overturned bus. It's a fun sequence, filmed from above. You'll find a snippet of that in the film's trailer.

Ava also has to deal with a few other unpleasant characters on her dark journey, including a psychotic who takes her hostage. Unhinged since the disaster ravaged his world, he's determined to put it all back together with Ava by his side.

In the end, Ava finds more than she bargained for.

When I left the theater, some of the carefully crafted visuals stuck with me, mostly the ones Daisy Ridley was right in the middle of.

The scene in the barn, that's the one that really knocked me out. 

It's part of a longer sequence, and this was the payoff, a surprise we didn't see coming.

And she's, literally, in spotlight, showing us that Ava is truly a survivor, someone who may survive the night. 

If anyone remembers this film in a year or two, more than likely Daisy Ridley will probably be the reason why.

She's tackled a few genres over the years. And she's proved that if she's able to work some very talented writers and directors, she can help everyone involved to make a pretty decent flick.

 RATING (On a scale of 1 to 5): 3.5.