Our Regrets Get Buried Just Like We Bury The Dead

Daisy Ridley, Brenton Thwaites, and Mark Coles Smith in the promotional poster for We Bury The Dead (2025)

Written by Niomi Dylan Sass

How guilty could someone feel about their actions? Is it enough to volunteer in a recently bombed country contaminated with an experimental contagion just to prove a point? A pursuit driven by guilt will be sure to eat you alive, unless the zombies do first. In the first horror movie to be released in the new year, We Bury The Dead (2026) explores the themes of regret and survival. The film was directed and written by Zak Hilditch, who also directed the movie 1922 (2017). It stars Daisy Ridley from Star Wars and Brenton Thwaites from DC Titans.

The opening song to the movie is “Pursuit of Happiness” by Wiz Khalifa, which feels like the perfect ironic song for a story like this. It follows the recently married Ava (Daisy Ridley), who is traveling to Tasmania right after a tragedy brought on by the U.S. Army, which accidentally set off experimental bombs killing hundreds of thousands of people. Ava has volunteered, along with many others, to assist the army in retrieving the corpses in the surrounding areas. She has personal motives to volunteer because her husband was there in Tasmania on an annual company retreat at the time the bombs went off, and she hasn’t heard from him since. 

As she’s getting assigned to which body retrieval unit, she asks about the location where her husband was. The whole surrounding area was still on fire and not deemed safe to search. Until then, she is assigned to a nearby neighborhood to start collecting the corpses. However, as they are being located, they are told that there has been some unusual behavior of the dead bodies, reanimating and coming back alive. The army tells the volunteers there is nothing for them to worry about because “they are slow-moving and docile.” The volunteers were all given a few special flares to spark if they were to come across one of the “odd ones,” so the military could handle them. By handling them, yes, re-eliminate the dead. 

The volunteers are partnered up in twos and set off combing each house for the dead and undead people. She gets paired up with Clay (Brenton Thwaites), and together they drag out numerous bodies, terribly mutated from the blast of the bombs. During their house sweeping, Ava comes across one of the reanimated ones in a garage and calls Clay over to spark the flare. She is locked in heavy eye contact with the odd one, and you can see that there is some small reminiscence of the person before they died. The military came and released two rounds, making sure the body was officially not alive. 

After a long day on the body retrieval unit, we see Ava going back to her quarters and preparing to leave. She has a map and finds a route from where she is to where her husband's located, revealing it's 200 miles away. She gets suited and booted up for a long, treacherous road ahead of her. Right as she is about to make it out of the holding facilities for the army and volunteers, she gets caught. Ava was able to lie her way into staying. The military guard suggested that she go and join the other volunteers at the party they were throwing.

The next day, Ava and Clay find themselves searching the grounds of a junkyard/car garage, where they stumble across a plethora of dead bodies. Clay also sees a beautiful motorcycle that he could only ever dream about riding. Ava sees an opportunity to search for her husband. She shows Clay her map, which has the route they can take to get to where her husband was last known to be. She gets to find her husband, while Clay would have the opportunity to ride the motorcycle. He then tells her that his country needs him, and the dead bodies need him, which he was just joking about, and agreed to help.

After traveling through over a hundred miles of toxic smoke from the remnants of the fire, going on from the bombs, they finally reach a point where they can take a break. As they are catching their breath, one of the odd ones appears, but this one is hostile. As the two of them attempt to fight it off, a military dude comes in and eliminates the threat. He goes on to tell them that the longer they stay reanimated, the more agitated they become, making them aggressive.

Daisy Ridley as Ava in We Bury The Dead (2026)

The military man tells them that the area they are in is restricted and asks why they are over there. Ava tells him that they are volunteers with the body retrieval unit and branched off to go looking for her husband. The military man tells them he’s going to have to take a report from them separately and holds Ava in another room. Hours must have gone by because she wakes up from a nap from the noise of the military man coming back, but without Clay. He said Clay ran off almost immediately, and he had spent the last few hours searching for him. He goes on to tell Ava that he sympathizes with her and will help her with her search, but he has to stop somewhere to pick up a few things along the way. 

As soon as they arrive at the location where the military personnel have to collect some items, he begins to act strangely almost instantaneously. He tells her that they should stay there for a little bit to eat. While they are eating, he reveals to Ava that his wife was a victim of the bomb, and she was so close to having her baby. He lost both of them and wanted to get closure. He asks Ava if she would be willing to dress up in his wife's clothes and dance with him one last time. Desperate to find her own husband, she agreed to this weird request. When she gets dressed, she doesn’t put on her dead wife's wedding ring, and it ruins the whole fantasy for the military man. He starts getting aggravated and tries to force her to put the ring on when she attacks him to be able to get away.

Now the animated corpses that grow more hostile with every passing moment are the least of her concerns. She has to escape the clutches of a man who lost all sense of reality from trying to cope with the death of his wife and unborn baby. Will she survive the twisted psyche of a deranged, mourning military man? Where did Clay go? Will Ava find her husband alive, dead, or turned into one of the odd ones? That is up to you to go see this movie and find that out. When I do movie reviews, I love to give just enough details and exposition without spoilers, with high hopes of enticing the readers to go watch for themselves. 

I thoroughly enjoyed how the writer Zak Hilditch created his own version of a zombie in this film. They looked like remnants of mutated people instead of rotting corpses like other zombies. These felt different; the docile ones felt like they still held a piece of their soul, which gets lost after death. There was a part of the movie that I found oddly beautiful. Ava finds herself a little RV camper where she took 4 dead bodies out of it, a family, so she can rest there for a bit. In the middle of the night, she hears one of them coming back to life. As she’s getting ready to exterminate it, she realizes that it’s digging a hole. The zombie sees her but continues to dig the hole. Ava helps him out, and it cuts to them putting the other bodies from the camper into the hole. After his family was in the hole with him, he stood there and kind of looked at Ava like he was ready to be with his family now, resting in their new grave. So much was said with the complete absence of words in this scene- yes, I am an emotional being and cried during this part. 

The other aspect of the film I enjoyed, and I will give the credit to the writer and director for this, too. The most chilling and unsettling part of the whole film was the interaction between the military dude and Ava. It really highlights how a man who lost everything becomes the most monstrous creature, even more than dead people coming back to life. The movie also shows how a person's guilt can push them past the point of no reconciliation. I told you about the military guy's story, but Ava and Clay are running from decisions that fill them with regret, too. Also, to call a spade a spade here, this was a man-made disaster. In this fictitious world, it was the United States President who accidentally set off a nuclear bomb. How do you accidentally do that? 

If you are looking for a film with huge zombie battles and gore, this is not the movie you’re searching for. I’m so sorry. However, if you are looking for a high-stakes thriller that experiments with how people cope with grief and a lack of closure through the lens of the undead, then this is definitely the movie. It’s sitting pretty with a 84% score on Rotten Tomatoes and deservedly so. If you’re looking to bring in the new year with a new thriller, then head to the theatres and go see We Bury The Dead (2026) while you can!

Promotional movie poster for We Bury The Dead (2026)