Daisy Ridley Is Reinventing the Zombie Movie

Australian writer-director Zak Hilditch knows exactly what to say when people ask what his next film, We Bury the Dead, is about. “Oh, it’s a Daisy Ridley zombie movie,” he laughs while in an exclusive conversation at our SXSW studio. But Hilditch also knows there’s a lot more to his new film than that.

“There are many ways you could sell this movie,” he observes. “It’s about grief and it happens to have zombies in it; it’s a movie about isolation; it’s a movie about guilt and redemption. It just happens to be set against this canvas of a larger than life situation.” We Bury the Dead is, in summation, about “an ordinary person caught in an extraordinary situation.”

For Hilditch, that premise has been his inspiration and a life’s obsession for the better part of the last decade. “Those are the kind of movies that I’ve loved, like 28 Days Later, and that I’ve been making,” he says, referring to previous films such as his 2017 adaptation of a Stephen King story, 1922, and Rattlesnake from 2019. “The ordinary person in an extraordinary situation movies are my bread and butter, and this is like that on steroids.”

In the case of We Bury the Dead, the ordinary person in question is Ava, a woman whose marriage already seemed to be a hair’s breadth away from disaster before the world then literally ended—with her husband vanishing on the Australian island of Tasmania when hundreds of thousands of people dropped dead.

For Ridley, the concept was so compelling that she agreed to the part just 48 hours after receiving the script. “I’m a quick reader, apparently,” she quips. “I’m always like ‘if I don’t read quickly someone else is going to read it and take it!” But getting more candid, Ridley notes, “This film is about grief and watching someone who is so desperately trying to find an answer, even though she doesn’t know what that answer is going to be. That is so human and understandable,” Ridley says.

To find that answer, and her husband, like most of the characters in the film, Ridley’s heroine joins the Body Retrieval Unit, an organization of volunteers (mostly with loved ones missing on Tasmania) who go door-to-door, and town to town, looking for answers.

“A lot of people are seeking their own goodbyes too,” Ridley says. “So it’s very personal in a very big way, because everyone in the Body Retrieval Unit has lost someone. 

That isn’t to say the zombies don’t matter, because Ridley sees thematic importance to the living dead. “The zombies are representative of Ava. She’s in this moment in between. She’s neither here nor there. Emotionally, she’s trying to get to the next place… She’s so pushed by shame. There is so much that she is sorry for and she’s seeking absolution in a number of different ways. So she is trying to say goodbye to what’s left of her marriage.”

That sense of grief, and the daily indignities of suffering through a catastrophe, is what grounds the film’s apocalyptic imagery into something human and downbeat. This includes other significant characters Ava meets along the way. Characters like Riley (Mark Coles Smith), a military man who discovers Ava on the side of the road but is not necessarily a friend or ally to a civilian.

Yet for the actors portraying them, it was important these characters not appear as something as reductive as friends or enemies, heroes or villains.

“Ava views Riley as representative of the very human understanding that someone’s grief can become desperation,” notes  Ridley,“which in and of itself can become terrifying when someone is desperately seeking something.”

Unsurprisingly, Smith has a bit more understanding for his character, which he relates to Riley’s experience in the armed forces.

“Given Riley’s military background, this is a man who’s used to control,” Smith explains. “He’s trained his life to be in control of situations and to be able to engage. And he just has no control anymore. It’s interesting watching this person have to go through that huge polarization,” He pauses to cryptically smile, and then adds, “It makes for some fun on screen.”

As the emphasis on human interactions suggests, We Bury the Dead didn’t start out as a zombie film, nor as a response to the COVID pandemic. But it nonetheless ended up that way.

“I actually started writing it in Starbucks at the Grove in Los Angeles 2019, just before the world ended,” Hilditch says. “And it was a bit of a different script back then. The zombies sort of found their ways into the life of the film. After subsequent drafts, [the undead] were calling to me and saying, ‘Put us in and see what happens.’ Once I did, the theme and everything else started to click in a profound way. And then we’re off to the races.”

Once the zombies shambled their way into the script, they presented Hilditch with a unique set of challenges.

“How do you cut through all the zombie lore that exists out there with your zombie film? What’s going to be so special and different about this? For me, it was always about the themes. How we treat the zombies in the film reflects Ava’s journey… When you’re making a zombie movie, you can’t reinvent the wheel completely, but you want to put your stamp on it just enough to make an everlasting impression in the genre canon.”

Hilditch and his performers got something of an unwelcome hand in making their zombie movie distinct when real-life events started to reflect aspects of the film. 

“The sense of fire and burning things that we have in the movie looks like what happened recently in California,” Hilditch says. “We had to create ours through VFX and be meticulous with our drone shots, thinking about how we were going to convey that destruction. Then all of a sudden you’re just looking at things that are 10 times more intense on your phone.”

“My job as the writer is to just always think about what would really happen. My upbringing and life experiences led me to this version of the Australian military’s response to something of this magnitude happening in Tasmania. Banality is important because you want that sense of realism and let the zombies be larger than life on the other part of the canvas.”

For Ridley this banality helped her uncover new depths for her character.

“There is an awful sort of drudgery to Ava’s life,” Ridley points out. “She is in deep, deep grief, not knowing what it is that has happened to her husband. But the reality is she has joined the Body Retrieval Unit and they have to account for bodies. So even what they’re doing, which is so awful and hideous and emotional, has to become drudgery or otherwise you just couldn’t cope.”

The daily indignities of wading through the dead might sound harrowing, but it’s what makes We Bury the Dead stand apart from the average zombie film.

“So much of this film is about humanity. The zombies are almost human,” says Ridley. “They look like our friends and family do, t’s just that there is something missing—or something gained.”

We Bury the Dead premiered at the SXSW Film and TV festival on March 9.

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