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On paper, new horror movie We Bury the Dead is a zombie movie; it's big on post-apocalyptic vibes, as it charts a woman's desperate search for her husband after an experimental weapon is detonated in Tasmania and turns locals into violent, walking corpses. Its moving, melancholic focus on the brain-chomper's cut-short time, though, feels more in-keeping with a ghost flick.
It's not a big surprise to learn, then, that the final thing writer-director Zak Hilditch added to the script were the undead.
"I had no business ever making a zombie movie," he candidly tells GamesRadar+ ahead of the film's UK release. "I mean, I love zombie movies, but how do you make a new zombie movie?! You can't. You better have something really interesting and new to say, or just get out of here. But this idea of grief and having unfinished business, I was like, 'Oh, well, what if I dare to have some of these zombies have unfinished business?' Once we had that final piece, it just took off in a whole new direction, and I really felt like we had something unique."
Led by Star Wars' Daisy Ridley, We Bury the Dead follows Ava, an American physical therapist who travels to Australia to search for husband, who's been missing since an experimental weapon wiped out the area in which he's staying. Mitch, the husband, was there for a business trip – but as the film progresses, we learn that being on different continents was only one of the reasons behind the married pair's distance.
Knowing all too well that if she finds Mitch, he might not still be Mitch, determined Ava finds herself in the eye of the storm in Hobart, Tasmania, and is quickly tasked with disposing of the uninfected bodies by the Australian military. On the job, she meets free spirit Clay (Brenton Thwaites), who encourages her to ditch their duties and take a trip further south to check out the resort where Mitch was last seen.
"I just love stories about ordinary people caught in the extraordinary, and I'd much rather watch a character like Ava, who isn't a scientist or a soldier," says Hilditch. "We could have followed a scientist who's here to tell you about DNA. I just don't care about those things. I love the every-person dealing with something bigger than they can comprehend, so this is me doing that on steroids."
On their way to Woodbridge, Ava is forced to reconcile with the realities of her relationship and the fact that she and Mitch may never be able to resolve their problems, while she and Clay encounter a couple of survivors struggling to adjust to the island's new normal in their own ways.
"The whole story originated from grief, after the passing of my mother in 2017, and that idea of there's no silver bullet when it comes to navigating your grief," notes Hilditch. "There is no guide, you've got to figure it out yourself. Being in charge of acquitting her estate and going through my childhood home, and packing everything down eventually, was a very cathartic thing. It was so intimately weird going room-to-room and going through all her personal belongings. I just felt like there was something quite interesting about that. I didn't know what to do with that, but I knew that it was something worth exploring as a film to further go through, like, the catharsis.
"I didn't want to make a real Debbie Downer of a movie about a guy dealing with the death of his mom," he smiles. "I was like, 'What can I put this against?' And bit by bit, that idea of grief and not knowing how to facilitate it or how to find an end to it, with these visual ideas of going into a house and going through people's belongings, sort of started meshing it all together."
We Bury the Dead is out in US theaters now, and arrives on Digital HD in the UK on February 2. For more, check out our guide to all the upcoming horror movies heading our way.
