A grim, "elevated" zombie flick

PLOT: After a military experiment gone wrong, much of the population of Australia has been killed by a chemical weapons discharge. Yet, among the dead, some of the victims have come back “online” where they’re not exactly living, and not exactly dead. An American woman (Daisy Ridley) searching for her husband volunteers to be part of a body retrieval unit but soon goes off the grid.

REVIEW: It’s tough to make an original zombie flick (although hopefully that will soon change). Ever since 28 Days Later reinvigorated the genre back in 2003, we’ve been inundated with movie after movie, not to mention hundreds of episodes of The Walking Dead (and its spin-offs) and others. Into the fray comes the Australian We Bury the Dead, which is an attempt to make an elevated, realistic exploration of the genre. In this one, the undead are never referred to as “zombies” and are unlike any we’ve seen on film before. These undead victims aren’t particularly vicious, nor do they have a hunger for human flesh. They also can’t infect survivors. Instead, when they’re back “online” (which is how the film describes them), they’re relatively passive and sometimes have tiny remnants of who they used to be baked into them.

Daisy Ridley plays Ava, an American woman whose husband, Mitch (Matt Whelan) was away on a company retreat in Tasmania when an American chemical weapons test went awry and killed millions. She volunteers to be part of a body retrieval unit so that she can have some measure of closure, but soon, she convinces another volunteer, Clay (Brenton Thwaites), to take her to a quarantined area so she can try to find the body of her husband.

Much of the movie is a road odyssey through the infected parts of Australia. There’s very little in the way of horror, with it more focused on the human aspect. Ridley’s Ava is riddled with guilt over how, in the days before her beloved husband went on his fateful trip, their relationship had begun to curdle for some reason. She’s hoping that if she finds him, and he’s back “online,” she can help him have a more dignified end than what she’s seen, with the military simply shooting anyone who happens to come back.

Ridley does a great job of evoking the character’s profound grief over both her husband’s death and her need to find out what happened to him. Brenton Thwaites steals scenes as Clay, the party-boy Australian who spends his nights hooking up with other volunteers and doing drugs to deal with the trauma of what they see day by day.

As a drama, We Bury the Dead works well, with the Australian countryside beautifully photographed and the movie sporting an effective soundtrack by electronic musician Clay. Yet, the film goes awry at times, with writer-director Zak Hilditch unable to avoid falling prey to some cliches of the genre. One of the worst offenders is a lengthy aside featuring an intense soldier, Mark Coles Smith’s Riley, who seems wound too tight to be sane and is soon revealed to be a total psychopath. It’s such a familiar trope of the genre that when it hits, not only is it utterly predictable, but it’s also disappointing, as it makes the movie, for a good chunk of its running time, nothing you haven’t seen before.

As such, We Bury the Dead, for all its ambitions, can’t help but occasionally feel like a retread. With so much zombie content out there, it’s very difficult to add anything new to the genre. Inevitably, this movie doesn’t manage to overcome the familiarity of the genre, but even still, it is mostly entertaining for much of its running time thanks to the ace technical packaging, and good performances from Ridley and Thwaites. It’s solid but unspectacular.