We Bury the Dead

Grade: B-

I’ve been saying for years that if there’s any actress who has earned the right to do a lighter project, maybe something beneath them, it’s Vanessa Kirby. Everything I have seen her in has been a heavy drama, a lengthy historical biopic, and/or an action flick with her character in peril. Take a break from all that and do a breezy screwball romantic comedy set in a beach town sometime. I can now add Daisy Ridley to this list. After doing time in a trilogy set in a galaxy far far away, she went through hell to find her estranged father in The Marsh King’s Daughter, and then swam the English Channel in Young Woman and the Sea. Now, in We Bury the Dead, she is off to Tasmania to search for what’s left of her husband, who is the victim of a military experiment gone awry. He is either dead, or potentially zombified.

She is Ava. Her husband, Mitch, was on a business trip when a weapon was detonated that destroyed the city. As the area is looking for volunteers to be on “body detail,” Ava flies to Tasmania. The location Mitch was at is 200 miles away from where she’s been assigned, and isn’t supposed to leave. She travels down to this place, secretly and by any means necessary. The volunteers are briefed that not all of them died. Some came back, mute and with questionable motor function. A couple of them are violent, but most aren’t. Thanks – that’s a comfort.

Once we finally start to see them, they don’t seem to be much of a threat. A conk or two on the head will take them out. They move slowly, for the most part. Their behavior is inconsistent. A couple of them pursue an unaffected human with the speed and ferocity of the infected from the 28 Something-Or-Others Later movies. I’m not sure what their end game is, if they were to successfully catch up to a regular human. Would they kill the person, turn them into one of them, or something else? Another one we see is a sweet kindly old man who does no harm. A common trait is they grind their teeth. It’s not so much the sound (though it is bothersome), but the fact that they do it from side to side. I’ve heard that jaws are supposed to just go up and down, and horizontal movement might mess things up in ways I won’t get into. Made me shudder every time.

As the subject matter isn’t the most joyous, We Bury the Dead – understandably – has a dark tone throughout most of it. I’m not going to remember it very far down the road, but at just 92 minutes, it’s not long enough to be that insufferable or objectionable. The soundtrack has a couple of bangers that had me silently Shazaming on my watch. Ridley is a lovely presence, and if she hasn’t already, I yearn to see her in a more lighthearted project. It reminds me of something Whoopi Goldberg once said at the Oscars. When remarking that after Bruce Springsteen wrote “Streets of Philadelphia” and “Dead Man Walking,” she suggested he do a tune for the next Ace Ventura film as a change of pace.

After spending most of its runtime having a perpetually gloomy, straight-to-video vibe, the most life the movie has is in the last few minutes, when – at last – there are some glimpses of fun and happiness. I thought I may have made a mistake with estimating what time it would end, and there was significantly more film left – but no, it’s just a late but welcome burst of freedom from the doldrums. Ava does eventually find Mitch, and certain discoveries make it easy to turn the page and move on. I never could have predicted exactly how it ended, but it’s a clear completion of an arc, that’s for sure. We Bury the Dead will be right at home on regular TV during the day. I can picture people stumbling upon it, not remembering when it was in theaters, wondering why they haven’t heard of it, but settling in for an impulse watch. As a one-and-done, you could do a lot worse.

Grade: B-