“We Bury the Dead” is a 2025 zombie‑adjacent horror drama about grief, guilt, and the search for closure, set after a catastrophic military experiment in Tasmania. It uses the undead less as action monsters and more as symbols of unresolved loss and the way people struggle to let go.

Core premise

  • A U.S. military weapons accident or nuclear‑style detonation kills hundreds of thousands of people in and around Tasmania, turning the region into a mass grave.
  • Ava, played by Daisy Ridley, volunteers for a “body retrieval unit” so she can enter the disaster zone and search for her missing husband, Mitch, who was there on a work trip when everything went wrong.
  • As teams go house to house pulling out corpses for burial, some of the “dead” begin to reawaken in strange, unsettling ways.

What it’s really about

  • The movie is less about jump‑scare zombies and more about grief : how people chase the idea of one last chance, one last conversation, instead of accepting loss.
  • The rising dead act like eerie, half‑present echoes of who they were — often slow, vacant, or looping through small behaviors — turning them into symbols of unfinished business rather than standard flesh‑eaters.
  • Ava’s journey through the wasteland is basically an externalized version of mourning: burying strangers by day while secretly searching for her own husband at night, unable to let go of the possibility he’s somehow still “out there.”

Tone and style

  • Viewers and critics describe it as a slow‑burn, meditative zombie film instead of a big action apocalypse: more quiet dread, emotional tension, and moral choices than fast chases or huge set‑pieces.
  • The film leans into haunting visuals of scorched landscapes, silent towns, and still or minimally moving undead, creating a mood that’s mournful rather than purely scary.
  • Several reviewers highlight that the real “pain” in the story comes from regret, memory, and what characters never got to say before the disaster, not just from physical danger.

Why people are talking about it

  • It’s part of a newer wave of genre films that use zombies to explore emotional themes like trauma and loss, which has sparked forum discussions about expectations for “zombie movies” versus more introspective, character‑driven stories.
  • Daisy Ridley’s performance as a woman pushing herself into horror just to avoid emotional finality has been singled out as a strong, grounded center to the film.

TL;DR: “We Bury the Dead” is about a grieving woman who joins a body‑recovery team in a post‑disaster zone to find her husband, and discovers that the dead are quietly, mysteriously rising — turning her mission into a confrontation with what it really means to say goodbye.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.