Australia’s recent run of world-class horror cinema continues with We Bury the Dead, a hugely inventive and effective zombie thriller from writer-director Zak Hilditch. Starring Star Wars alum Daisy Ridley and Australian talent Brenton Thwaites, it will hopefully get a solid theatrical run once it finishes its current festival tour. Goodness knows it deserves one.

A catastrophic military accident has killed the entire population of Australia’s island state Tasmania. Ava (Ridley), an American immigrant, has joined a body retrieval team in the hope of discovering her late husband. With the help of fellow volunteer Clay (Thwaites), Ava breaks containment lines and heads south for the town where her husband was when the disaster occurred. It soon becomes clear, however, that not all of the victims are as dead as the authorities first believed.

We Bury the Dead is another great film from Hilditch, a Western Australian director who has successfully transitioned from his early ultra-low budget features to Hollywood. His 2017 feature 1922, based on a Stephen King novella, was a superb – and superbly bleak – thriller, and here he largely works in similarly grim territory.

It seems almost de rigueur to note that the zombie movie is a particularly crowded genre of horror film. Since the modern zombie was invented by director George Romero, they have been used as metaphors for all kinds of thing, they have been slow and fast, haunting and visceral, and pretty much every variation imaginable. Here Hilditch carves out a personal niche of his own. It has clear influences – Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later being the most obvious one – but in decent fashion they are used to push the genre into some fresh territory.

There is also no doubting this is an Australian horror film either: we have a particular penchant for the choice potty-mouthed exclamation, and here Brenton Thwaites gets the best one since Nathan Phillips’ despairing ‘aw, get fucked‘ in Justin Dix’s Blood Vessel (2019).

It is a great role for Daisy Ridley, who plays Ava with a great sense of subtlety and woe. This is, more than being scary, a remarkably melancholic film, and the enormous sense of loss expressed throughout is palpable. Ridley works as an anchor throughout: the situation that she leads us through is enormous in scale without ever feeling over-the-top, but by focusing closely on Ava’s situation the film consistently feels intimate. For his part, Brenton Thwaites is great – both dramatically effective and funny – and sheds a lot of the preconceptions that come from his earlier, more Hollywood-scale, roles.

There are imperfections. The film’s mid-section suffers from an overly familiar subplot involving a local military officer (Kym Jackson). It feels slightly derivative and unpleasant, although its ultimate payoff is worthwhile. The film also resists moving too far away from expected genre conventions, although whether that is a flaw or a feature will come down to viewer expectations.

Steve Annis shoots the film very well, adding yet another hot, yellowed landscape to the Australian screen tradition. The score by British electronic musician Clark is effective, and in places rather innovative.

I am, all things considered, a huge enthusiast for genre filmmaking. It has been so satisfying to see Australian filmmakers continue to build on our long legacy of strong speculative fiction – particularly horror. We Bury the Dead will hopefully get recognised as one of the best of the current wave.

We Bury the Dead is screening at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.