Daisy Ridley plays Ava Newman in “We Bury the Dead.” She is a desperate woman who races to Tasmania after a terrible U.S. military experiment kills 500,000 people and she hopes to find her husband alive. She joins a body retrieval unit, but things go horribly wrong when the corpses she buries start to come back to life, changing from slow-moving to violently hunting undead. In a post-apocalyptic quarantine zone, the movie mixes elements of a survival thriller with deep themes of grief, loss, and emotional turmoil.
Ridley talks about a very creepy dance scene with Mark Coles Smith’s character Riley, a soldier who is sad because his wife died and asks her to act like his wife in the middle of the zombie chaos. “That part really scared me the most,” she says, pointing out how it goes from unsettling closeness to full-on horror. This moment stands out because of the psychological fear it creates instead of just the usual gore, which makes the movie better than most zombie movies.
Zak Hilditch wrote and directed the movie, which stars Brenton Thwaites as Clay, Matt Whelan, Kym Jackson, and Deanna Cooney. It was filmed in Western Australia from February to March 2024, and it had its first showing at SXSW 2025. It then played at festivals in Atlanta and Adelaide before Vertical bought the rights to show it in the U.S. In her next movie, a romantic comedy called “The Last Resort,” Ridley will work with “Solo” star Alden Ehrenreich again.
The official trailer shows Ava’s terrifying quest and the undead chasing her without end. This builds excitement for the movie’s U.S. release on January 2, 2026, and its release in Australia and New Zealand on February 5. Critics say it has a lot of emotional depth for a zombie movie, and Ridley called it a “contemplative” thriller. Fans of her role as Rey in Star Wars can see her horror movie next year.
