Daisy Ridley has quietly turned her post Star Wars years into one of the more interesting genre pivot runs in recent memory. Even when the movies are uneven, like The Marsh King’s Daughter, the choices are rarely boring, and when they click, like Sometimes I Think About Dying, you can see her stretching in real time. That streak continues with Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead, a January release that arrives with all the baggage of the calendar’s reputation and still manages to offer more craft and atmosphere than you typically get in that slot.
Ridley plays Ava, a woman searching for her husband after a catastrophic military accident wipes out more than half a million people in seconds. Then the impossible starts happening. Some bodies wake back up. Some stay docile. Some turn hostile. Ava joins the recovery effort, which quickly stops being only about identifying and burying the dead and becomes about staying alive around the ones who are no longer fully dead.
Hilditch approaches the zombie framework from an angle that is more mournful than adrenalized. This is not The Walking Dead or Zombieland or World War Z, where the creatures exist mainly to chase, swarm, and tear. The film feels closer in spirit to Handling the Undead, using reanimation as a way to literalize grief and the longing to see someone one last time. When it is sitting in that eerie in-between, it is genuinely affecting, and Ridley’s steadiness helps sell the emotional weight without turning it into melodrama.
The surprise is that We Bury the Dead also has a few sequences that snap into real tension. Ava does come face to face with reanimated corpses in moments that are tight, scary, and well staged. The movie also creates a sense of scale that feels larger than its presumed budget, giving Ava’s journey room to breathe across terrain that looks harsh and expansive. Hilditch lets the landscape do some of the storytelling, and the photography carries a bleak beauty that sticks.
READ MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: American Sweatshop, Marty Supreme, Megadoc
Where it falters is the balance between theme and forward momentum. Like Handling the Undead, the film leans on conversations and encounters that are meant to clarify what it means to confront death and unfinished love. Some of those beats land, but others feel thinner than the movie wants them to feel, more like an idea being stated than a revelation being earned. The grief material can turn a little microwaved, and the plot threads do not always converge with the force you want after such strong setup.
Still, as a January genre release, this is better than expected. We Bury the Dead is not the full-throttle swing it could have been, but it is thoughtfully made, often striking to look at, and anchored by Daisy Ridley continuing to prove she is not coasting. If Hilditch had pushed the emotional and horror elements into a more unified shape, this could have been something special. As it stands, it is a solid, occasionally moving zombie adjacent drama with real filmmaking inside it.
Score: 6/10
We Bury the Dead (2026)
- Cast: Daisy Ridley, Mark Coles Smith, Brenton Thwaites
- Director: Zak Hilditch
- Genre: Horror, Thriller
- Runtime: 95 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: January 2, 2026
- Movies Like We Bury the Dead: The Elixir, 28 Years Later, Train to Busan, More Movies Like We Bury the Dead
- Follow us on Letterboxd
