Horror Movie We Bury the Dead, Living Corpses with Daisy Ridley and Brenton Thwaites

We Bury the Dead, the Plot of the Movie

We Bury the Dead is the upcoming horror and thriller movie. A catastrophic American military experiment causes an enormous number of casualties in Tasmania. Ava (Daisy Ridley) joins a body recovery unit to help identify the dead and search for her husband in the southern part of the island.

As Ava heads south through the devastated landscape, she soon discovers that some of the disaster victims are coming back to life.

In the released trailer, Ava tries to enter a bus while a corpse chases her. “There must be a way to reach the highway without them catching up to us,” she tells her colleague Riley (Mark Coles Smith). “I know what you’re going through. But if you should find your husband, I hope you understand what that might mean,” he states.

“Want to know why only some of them come back? They have unfinished business,” Riley says.

We Bury the Dead, the Cast of the Movie

Daisy Ridley has starred in Young Woman and the Sea and as Rey, and will be in the new saga movie: she recently appeared in Young Woman and the Sea and Cleaner.

The cast also includes Brenton Thwaites, who worked on I Met a Girl and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales as Henry Turner, and in the TV series Titans; Mark Coles Smith, who previously appeared in Sweet As; Matt Whelan, interpreter of episodes of The Gone.

Mark Coles Smith has acted in Occupation: Rainfall and in the series Hard Rock Medical. Direction and screenplay are by Zak Hilditch, who previously directed Rattlesnake and 1922, based on a novel by Stephen King.

We Bury the Dead, the Production and Filming of the Movie

Production is by The Penguin Empire and Campfire Studios. Filming began in February 2024 in Albany, Western Australia, and concluded in March. The movie releases in U.S. theaters on January 2, 2026.

We Bury the Dead, Critical Reviews

The movie was presented at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival of 2025, where it received positive reviews. According to Screen Rant, “although the movie follows the path of Shaun of the Dead and refuses to use the word that begins with z, there’s no denying that We Bury the Dead is a zombie movie, albeit on a smaller scale than some might expect.”

For Collider, “it’s a broad but sparse zombie remix, too far removed from the genre it exploits.”

According to Bloody Disgusting, “it’s a melancholic work that manages to find new horizons when it comes to the already familiar zombie horror genre, while offering some bursts of genuine scares and an awe-inducing sense of scale, although Hilditch is often hesitant to abandon familiar territory.”