We Bury the Dead review: gruesomely hilarious Tasmanian survival thriller

In We Bury the Dead, Hobart is gone. Annihilated. A charnel house belching ash and fire into the sky as thick, grey smoke ensnares Tasmania. Newsreaders the world over relay what little is known about the accidental deployment of an experimental weapon carried by a passing US warship. The Australian Prime Minister is apoplectic.

This is the astounding opening gambit of Zak Hilditch’s epic disaster/zombie movie hybrid. Debuting at the Adelaide Film Festival, with a local release to follow next year, it builds on the bones of his more intimately scaled and also excellent debut feature, These Final Hours.

Despite Americans being persona non grata right now, Daisy Ridley’s physiotherapist, Ava, descends into this inferno. She’s signed up to join one of the many body retrieval units clearing the north, with the south out of bounds for now. Devonport has been commandeered by the Australian Defence Force, strictly controlling access to the island for the many volunteers required to handle the unimaginable casualties.

But whatever this weapon did, some of the dead are unquiet. Their scrambled brains command their shattered remains to get back up and fight, necessitating a home-by-home search to ensure they’re six feet under as fast as humanly possible, with shades of the Covid outbreak in scenes of mass burials by industrial excavators.

We Bury the Dead: digging

Lugging bodies is difficult business, especially when confronted with scenes of entire families slumped at the breakfast table, children and all. In this sick-making endeavor, Ava’s paired with muscularly bogan revhead Clay, as played by Titans star Brenton Thwaites with bombastic charm in his career’s finest hour.

About as far from a dignified gravedigger as it’s possible to imagine, Clay’s a crack-up, spouting profoundly Aussie profanities, including ‘Go be a dead cunt somewhere else,’ while huffing durries and dropping hints Ava should sort his buggered shoulder. She has more pressing concerns.

Her husband (Kiwi actor Matt Whelan) was on a work trip to a luxury resort just south of Hobart. She’s determined to evade the perimeter guards and cross the island in search of him as soon as possible, with the weight of unsaid words bearing down on her.

For all his boorish behaviour, Ava realises it’ll be tough going without Clay’s company. Agreeing in a heartbeat, he’s like a kid at Christmas when they uncover a sleek Ducati motorbike in a lock-up littered with the bodies of a buck’s party, replete with a disturbingly gurning stripper – all these rotting corpses grind their teeth like crumbling chalk.

It’ll be easier to evade these shuffling carcasses plus the military barricades on two wheels, taking to dirt tracks when roads are blocked by tanks.

We Bury the Dead: voyage of the damned

This voyage of the damned, going south, is when We Bury the Dead shows off its scope (and budget), upending the tourism board image of Tasmania with its stark visuals of livestock rotting in fields, roads choked with arrested traffic, townships in disarray and downed planes littering otherwise pristine beaches.

It’s a wow-a-minute crusade with a hint of 28 Days Later, including the questions it raises over who is the most monstrous: the mindless victims of this atrocity, or those just following orders?

Mystery Road: Origin lead Mark Coles Smith, a Nyikina man, is also brilliant in the role of Riley, a gravel-voiced and burly soldier who stumbles across them during a zombie attack in a roadside cafe. He’s not best pleased to find them far beyond the boundary line, leading to an intensely stressful sequence set in a remote farmstead.

We Bury the Dead: sparkling disaster

Stepping convincingly out of the shadows of Star Wars, Ridley is remarkable as a Ripley-like figure who could never have imagined the hell in which she finds herself. Ava isn’t an accomplished fighter or a dab hand with a gun. She usually contends with stubborn shoulder knots like the one bothering Clay.

But we witness the heady brew of her niggling grief, turbocharged by equal doses of denial and determination, transforming her not into a machine, but an edge-driven warrior of chance who has no other choice.

Hilditch’s command of the material is impressive, and the results feel as big as Hollywood. The zombie designs are gloriously gruesome, with Hayley Atherton’s make-up, Jason Baird’s prosthetics and special effects, Lisa Galea Gunning’s costumes and Chris Weir’s stunt coordination all running wild. Merlin Eden’s visual effects seamlessly integrate into Steve Annis’ stunning cinematography, with Christopher Stephen Clark’s grinding electro score shuddering the bones.

If it overshoots a perfect ending or two in favour of a schmaltzier one, then that’s excusable, with Hilditch giving George Miller a run for his gas-guzzling money as one of the most ambitious Australian directors working today.

For all the film’s grim outlook and ingrained tragedy, the gore and the shriek-inducing jump scares, he’s having a blast. When a bottle of bubbles becomes Ava’s weapon of choice, We Bury the Dead secures its future cult classic status, perfectly encapsulating this apocalyptic vision’s grafting of grit and nervous giggles.

We Bury the Dead screened as part of the Adelaide Film Festival 2024 and is scheduled for general release in 2025.

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