Hi, everybody, John here with a quick programming note. Due to some logistical problems, we were not able to deliver The Horror at Party Beach to you this week. We will be delivering that next week. And you will hear, the week after that, you will hear The Earth Dies Screaming. So this week instead, Andy and I have recorded an episode on the new zombie film, 2026's We Bury The Dead, starring Daisy Ridley. So please enjoy that, and we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next week. Welcome to Zombie Strains, the podcast where we watch all of the zombie films in order, except for this week, where we're watching 2026's We Bury The Dead. You know, I've seen people act like that in pictures. What do they call them, zombies or something? Zombie.

What's a zombie?

Just what is a zombie?

Well, a zombie? There's, Mr. Bill is. The living dead.

There's a living dead.

It's an army of zombies. Because a zombie has no will of his own.

What is wrong?

What is wrong? Hi, everybody, I'm John.

And I'm Andy.

And welcome to our, not review, but discussion of the latest zombie film, We Bury The Dead, starring Daisy Ridley. And we'll get into details about who's in it, but we're gonna do something a little different today. Andy, what are we doing today?

Yeah, we're gonna discuss We Bury The Dead. Once again, John and I have snuck into the Zombie Strains lab without Brad's being aware of it. So, you know, we're trying to keep the lights down and-

Don't tell Brad. If anybody sees producer Brad, don't tell him we did this, please.

So, this is a new movie. It's at the time of this recording, it's still out in theaters. I think John and I would both agree that it is a good movie. It's one, you know, it's worth watching.

I agree.

We are going to discuss it in sort of two stages. We're gonna have an initial discussion about it that avoids major spoilers. We will be spoiling stuff that, like, you would learn by watching the trailer, I think, pretty much.

Yes.

And then when we are going to transition, then into a spoiler discussion of a couple of details, we will clearly state that. So we'll warn you when it's, if you're a really spoiler-sensitive person, we'll warn you when it's time to hit pause.

And I will say, there are some spoilers that are better not to know, but it's not like weapons.

Right.

Where if you are spoiled is ruined.

Yeah, there's not a giant, there's not a big twist at the end or anything.

There's some personal dynamics that have twists to them, but they're not like earth shattering.

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Okay.

All right. So John, do you want to just kind of give us a rundown on the basics of this movie? What is it? Who is in it? How did it come to be?

So this movie began filming in February of 2024. We'll give US release dates because I think it came out at different times and different places. But in the US, it's theatrical releases January 2nd, 2026. However, did its world premiere in March at the 2025 South by Southwest Film and TV Festival. And it comes out actually in Australia and New Zealand on February 5th, 2026. So if you're from Down Under, you haven't seen it yet, which is bizarre because it's an Australian film.

I know that seems deeply unfair. It's their movie.

I know, it's their movie. The film was written and directed by Zach Hilditch, or perhaps he goes by Zachary. No, it's Zach. Hold on.

It's Zach. I mean, with us, it would just be Zach, right?

Hang on one second. I just want to see what else he's done. He has a couple of other credits. 1922, 2017 film, Transmission in 2012, and his last movie before this was 2019's Rattlesnake, which I know nothing about.

Is 1922 the Stephen King adaptation?

I believe it is. There's some other interesting films here. One that's highly rated that I haven't seen from 2010 called The Toll. I don't know if you've heard of that.

I have not heard of it, no.

Some sort of horror movie. So he's not the most famous director in the world, but I think he's certainly from this film, a competent director.

Yeah, he's got it, and he's got a track record. On the strength of this film, I am now interested in going back and revisiting a couple of those early ones. I think I have seen 1922, and I think it was fine. I don't know if I have a stronger opinion about it than that.

Yes. It stars in the leading role, Daisy Ridley. She plays, is it Ava, I believe is her name?

Ava, yes.

You know her from Star Wars episodes 7, 8, and 9 as Rey. And she was also in, she's actually, I've seen her in several things. I think she's great. She was also in Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Kenneth Branagh. She was in The Marsh King's Daughter. There's some other stuff she was in. And she was in a COVID sort of comedy movie called The Bubble, about people making a movie, trying to make a TV show during COVID that descends into sort of-

That's a fun premise.

Yeah. And she's English. She's done a lot of work. I think she's a very good actress and it's on display here.

Do you think once you're a Star Wars actor, a Star Wars leading actor, you get to pick whatever role you're in? Or do you think it's like a kind of a problem and you're very limited by your appearance in Star Wars?

I think it depends. Like Mark Hamill, he did get to do some other stuff, but it's not really until recently where he's back to A-list. You know what I mean? And Harrison Ford, however, remained A-list the whole time because he immediately did Indiana Jones as well and Blade Runner. So it's hard to say. I think Daisy has opportunities. I don't think she's slumming it. So yeah, I think it's hard to say. But I think another example, John Boyega has complained that he is typecast and has been struggling to get roles. So I think it's hit or missed. It's cultural. So other people in this movie. So her main sort of sidekick in this is a very handsome Australian man named Clay. So he's got like this long brown hair. I wanted to describe him as absurdly handsome. Like he looks kind of like a cross between Jason Momoa and Chris Hemsworth. He's got a large olive skin and the long dark hair, but he's got very sort of sharp features. But I found out, I think he's actually American, or actually I shouldn't say that because I'm not certain. The only other thing he's been in that he was in The Giver. He was in Gods of Egypt. He had a bit part in Pirates of the Caribbean. But the one thing that jumped out on his resume to me was he was in the DC TV series Titans as Dick Grayson playing both Robin and Nightwing. So there you go, which went 46 episodes. I watched one of those, but yeah, so there you go. I wouldn't have recognized him if it hadn't been there.

He is, I think I would describe him as kind of dreamy. He's dreamy, yeah. Like he's, if you're going, if you're doing a summer vacation in Australia, he's the dreamy guy you hope to meet.

Exactly. He's like absurd, like he's too much of that guy. He's like a surfer with long hair, absurdly handsome, deep voice, smoke cigarettes, the whole thing. So, and then Mark Coles Smith is an Australian actor, and he plays the other main part, which we will get to in a little bit, a soldier named?

Riley.

Riley, that's right. And there's some other people, Matt Whelan plays Mitch in the flashbacks. There's other minor characters, but that's about it. We'll leave it there. All right, so how are we going to do this, Andy? I think you came up with an idea, and you were going to surprise us.

Yeah, so let's just take a quick minute. We usually do, in our normal episodes, we'll do like a 30 or 60 second overview of the plot. We are not going to go through the plot in the same level of detail that we do in our normal episodes. So I think this movie breaks pretty cleanly into three acts. Let's just take 30 seconds per act and go through those. And then John, I propose, I have a list of zombie movie tropes that I wrote down that I think this movie embodies, and we're going to get into that list. So does that sound good?

Yeah, so nobody worry. We're not spoiling it right out of the gate. We will signal loudly when the spoilers start. So anything we mentioned in this first part, you could have found out from the trailer.

Okay, you know, the trailer is actually an interesting thing. Let's take a quick second and talk about it. So this movie was kind of divisive. If you go on Rotten Tomatoes, it's got a pretty high critic score, but the regular Joe and Jane American Movie Goer rating is like 50%-ish at the time of this recording.

And I have two things to say about that. One is it's 89% critic score, which is pretty good, though there's a whole thing about how studios are jamming the tomato meter. I don't want to get into that. I think if there's sincere reviews, any of the complaints are like, it's a little too schmaltzy. But it only had a 48% tomato meter rating from users. And I honestly don't know if that's still Star Wars backlash nonsense or a legitimate negative review of this movie. I can't tell. I could see how somebody wouldn't like it, but it's not like that bad. You know what I mean?

Yes, I suspect all those things are factors, but I want to propose that one of the problems with this movie is its marketing. Yes. After watching this movie, I went and watched the trailer, and it was like watching a trailer for a different movie. They basically... This is not a hardcore zombie action thriller.

Absolutely not.

This is a slow-moving personal story in which the zombies are important to the story. They're not just tacked on, but if you watch the trailer, John, they take every actiony scene in the movie is put into this trailer, and it looks like 28 days later, a tense horror fest.

Yeah, it's like soldiers and shooting and helicopters, and that's like 10 minutes of the movie.

Yes, exactly. So I think some of this might be people thinking they were getting a 28 days later, and instead they got something different. I agree.

Yeah, I think that's correct.

All right. So, hey, John, I'm just going to just chart the general overarching plot of this film. This movie slots into three acts pretty well. And act one.

Do we want to say the premise really quick? Just right off the jump?

Yes, why don't you say the premise and then I'll do it.

Yeah, I won't do a full summary again, because we're avoiding spoilers up front. But the premise is, it jumps right into it. There was a weapons test by the US, of course. Of course, Australians would do that. Off the coast of Tasmania that goes awry. And this device, it's an electromagnetic pulse device, let's wave our hands a little bit about how this would work, that kills everybody on Tasmania and wipes out a town right near the blast site, as if it were Hiroshima. But the rest of Tasmania is intact, but everyone's dead. However, some people, and we don't know why, return from the dead. It's not everybody, and you cannot predict when it's gonna happen. So that's the premise of this movie.

Yes. So it breaks into three acts pretty nicely. In act one, we meet our main character. This is a small scale movie. There's really only a couple of important people in it. Yep. And we meet Ava. Ava is an American married to, is she married to an Australian man or is-

No, they're both American.

They're both American.

His name is Mitch.

He's an American who has volunteered, Australia's put out the call for civilians to volunteer to basically go to Tasmania under military supervision and clean out all the bodies. Because the entire population of Tasmania has died. And Daisy is here though, her motive is not just, I want to help out my Australian friends. Her husband was on a business retreat in Tasmania at the time that this weapon went off and everyone was killed. So she is there to find out what, to see if she can find him or find out what happened to him. And so in this first act, we get kind of the rules of this zombie world are laid out for us. So everyone is dead in Tasmania, but it's importantly, most people died just from the shock of some sort of electromagnetic negative pulse, switching their brains off. So they weren't torn up or shredded or blown apart.

Yeah, like it's a neutron bomb kind of thing. If you remember the 80s, the fear of the neutron bomb, everybody dies, but everything's intact kind of thing.

Yes. So as she goes through, doing in this corpse retrieval job, you're going to see a bunch of scenes of people who have just dropped in the middle of eating dinner or playing a game in their backyard or watching TV.

People watering the lawn and the hose is still on.

Yes, exactly. So Ava is teamed up when you are on corpse disposal duty. She's teamed up with another person. And this guy is Clay. And you can sense that Clay also has some sort of reasons for being here that maybe aren't that he's not saying. And we'll find those out much later in the movie. And the two of them go about in their corpse retrieval task. Importantly, though, Ava is told right up front, her husband is down at the south end of Tasmania near the big city of Hobart, which was annihilated. And she is told right up front, you're not allowed to go down there. It's too dangerous. So she's, you know, maybe if you, in weeks or months after we've cleared the area up here in the north, maybe then you can go down. So you can tell already that's not gonna sit well with her and it's not a big surprise that she's gonna try to find a way to get down to find her husband.

And the city of Hobart, the region given to Hobart, is still on fire.

Yeah. So John, why does, why does she want to meet her husband if he's just dead? Like, can you tell us a little bit about the twist here?

This happens in the trailer of the film, also right in the first scene. The people who are on corpse recovery duty learn that sometimes people come back. So the, the premise here is that, is that Ava has come to Tasmania in case her husband returns from the dead.

Yes. You know, clearly hoping, nervously hoping that that might be the case, right?

Correct.

So that goes on for a little while and we just sort of see how this works. They, they clear out a bunch of houses. We learn about this stuff. We meet a couple of the undead and we'll talk in more detail about the zombies in a minute. So the second act of the movie, I'll let you go watch the movie and see how this happens. But she winds up traveling with Clay on their own across Tasmania on an unsanctioned road trip to go find the place where her husband was when the disaster hits. Correct. And then that takes up the bulk of the movie. This part of the movie is probably the closest to what you're expecting. If you are looking for just a kind of a standard zombie movie. And then the final act is sort of the resolution she gets. She does reach the place where her husband died. And that's where kind of some of her personal drama and storyline gets wrapped up in the end. So that's as much detail as I want to go in on the plot. And there's a lot of little, again, there's no huge twists in this movie, but there's a lot of little kind of good moments that you'll want to see for yourself.

Yeah, I agree completely.

So John, I have a couple of tropes I've identified that we can talk about without spoiling anything significant.

All right.

And one of them I already mentioned, that this is a small scale zombie movie with a really limited cast. This is what I would call a really human scale. And it reminded me, John, of just in our podcast, the zombie movies we watched in the 1930s, tended to be an incredibly small scale drama that weren't really these movies didn't have the big cast that you'd find in like The Walking Dead or something where you have lots of personalities with lots of agendas and stuff like that. Instead, it's really just a couple of people working out their traumas and mistakes and bad choices. Any thoughts on that?

It's not unlike The Girl With All The Gifts, but the scale is even smaller. Yes. Like if you took out all the bits where they were in the compound of Girl With All The Gifts or any of the zombie hoards, like you'd be, you've had a pretty close version of this movie. It's really about these people figuring themselves out and figuring out their relationships. So yes. And in fact, there's no zombie hoards in this movie at all.

No. No, I think all of the zombie moments are with solo zombies.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so that leads into the second trope, John, which I'm interested to get your take on this. I would call this a, this is a movie with a limited scale apocalypse that features an infection zone or a quarantine zone, a part of the world that has been sealed off from the rest of the globe.

Just like 28 days, weeks and years later, right?

Yes.

It only takes place in England. This is the same kind of thing. It's only Tasmania.

Yeah. So when you think about zombie movies, on one end of the spectrum, there are these movies where there's nothing global about it at all. There's a couple of people and a couple of zombies deep in the Caribbean, and that's the extent of it. Yeah. On the other end, you have your World War Zs and Walking Dead's where the whole world has been destroyed.

Yeah. Even Dawn of the Dead is like that. The whole world is gone. Yeah.

And less commonly, but it is definitely a thing, are these movies where a specific part of the world has been quarantined off. And I think, I always think that this adds just an interesting, interesting setting element to these stories.

Yeah. And I wonder if part of that is, maybe people are tired of overall apocalypse movies, and it's, you know, maybe the Walking Dead just wore everybody out from that. I don't know. But now if you want to work with these tropes, you have to sort of create a MacGuffin that keeps it from being everywhere all the time, I think. I mean, we'll see what other movies come out. But I think this limited scale also controls the story you can tell, right? Also, like, so these characters can have resources that survivors in a zombie apocalypse would not have, for example.

Yes. I also think it means that if you're in the infection zone, you are quite possibly choosing to be there.

Yes.

Because you have something you need or want to do.

So it eliminates the sort of innocent bystander almost, right?

Yes. So in your Walking Dead's, where the whole world is dead, you don't have a choice to be in this apocalyptic world. But in a limited-scale apocalypse, one of two things is probably the case. One is you were caught in this zone like in 28 Days Later.

Right.

And you probably want to escape. In fact, I think in 28 Days Later, they are hoping to be rescued and airlifted out of the infection zone. And so that's an obvious plot motivator. But a number of these movies also feature people who really ought to be staying safely at home, deciding to go into the most dangerous region in the world for some sort of driving plot. And I think the question of what would be so important to you that you're going into a zombie infection zone to resolve it, that makes... That's a pretty good question. That question creates some pretty cool answers, I think, sometimes as far as character motivation goes.

Yeah, and in Act 1, we see... This is not a spoiler, because it's not... I hope it's not in the major characters. Some volunteers drop out almost immediately when they see what's happening.

All right, so John, I have a couple of questions about this. I've just been thinking back. So what might you say is like the urtext of the limited scale apocalypse movie?

I'm trying to think.

And this isn't a trick question. I'm just curious what springs to mind. I have an answer that I'll share, but.

I don't know. Maybe... I don't know. I don't have a good answer for that. I have to think about it.

So I want to toss out John Carpenter's Escape From New York.

Oh, that's good. I like that.

It's not a zombie movie, but in that movie, Manhattan Island's been sealed off, not due to infection or anything, but just because of out of control 1980s crime, urban crime.

Right, that's right.

This is a, I did think back, I did try to make a list of zombie movies that feature this trope. So you've got your 28 days, weeks, and years later where England has been sealed off. Although at least 28 weeks later suggests that the infection at least temporarily got out of England.

Yes, but you get the, in 28 years later, sorry, spoiler, there's foreigners who make it very, who show up there that make it very clear that the rest of the world is going on as normal and you've been quarantined.

Yes. I, have you seen Train To Busan or its sequel, John?

No, I haven't and that's on my list.

Okay, in that movie, I think in the sequel, we learn that the whole Korean Peninsula has been quarantined for the same reason.

Okay.

Of the movies we've watched in this podcast, John, historically, are there any that you would say predict this trope? I have one in mind.

I have one in mind too. And I'm not sure if it works. I'm going to say Revolts of the Zombies, which is very early. But it's a limited scale, but it is the entire area in which it takes place. Everyone is getting turned into a zombie, and the death of the zombie master sort of releases them. So it's a small scale apocalypse. So the world doesn't end. The world does become covered in zombies for a brief time.

That's a good one. That's earlier than I had thought. I had landed on the man with the atom brain.

That's also a good one.

Because that was, I think, our first movie where we actually saw a national military force sealing off a town.

Yes, that's true.

To contain the threat.

And I was gonna say Invisible Invaders, which immediately followed, I believe. Brad's not here to get me right on the order. But that one is worldwide, I think.

I think that is too. I wondered about that one too, but I think that one's pretty global. And I hate to say it, but Horror at Party Beach has a little bit of these vibes because it's a zombie threat. It's bigger than just a couple of protagonists that are being threatened. They're threatening the whole town. And there's not really a sense that they're gonna spread to other towns, I don't think. I mean, maybe, I don't know. Anyway, but that is a very, I don't.

It's suggested you could avoid them by just skipping this town.

Yeah, exactly. All right, I'm almost done talking about this trope. I just wanna say, so this is a theme that comes up in zombie video games, which we don't talk a lot about, but obviously video games are a big way that the zombie genre is kind of perpetuated these days. And so the video game franchises Dying Light and Dead Island both feature this trope where you're like either stuck in a quarantine zone with zombies, or you're sent on a mission into the world's worst city that's full of zombies.

Yeah, and what I like about this is there's a suggestion of hope and normalcy, if you can just achieve it. In The Walking Dead, I think seasons ago, people abandoned any hope of that sort of thing.

Yeah, The Walking Dead, it is a hope. I mean, so I've not watched all of the show. The comics, the comic book, it ends on a hopeful, optimistic note actually.

Oh, that's good.

But the show is very down on the future of humanity. Yeah, I would say. So John, my last comment here is, so because of this trope, I think my favorite movie, my personal favorite movie that does this trope that We Bury The Dead reminded me a lot of is have you seen the 2010 movie Monsters?

I have, I love that movie.

Me too. And that it reminded me, We Bury The Dead reminded me a lot of Monsters because-

I had forgotten about that movie, but as soon as you said it, yeah.

Yeah. It's got this quarantine zone due to alien invasion, kind of, not zombies, in northern Mexico, southern US. It's kind of a, you know, I think we're supposed to read a lot of ideas about immigration into it. But it also shares with We Bury The Dead, this slow and really personal pace, I think. Almost, almost meditative at points.

Now that you've said that, you've got me thinking, annihilation has the same feel, you know, like a limited scope to the disruption of the universe kind of thing. Though there it's suggested it's going to keep growing, but yeah, yeah, I like that. I love Monsters. And then he went and did the Godzilla movie, which I think was fine, but there was something special about Monsters. Sort of like District 9, you know, like I don't know anything super substantial came from that director again, but that one idea was executed so well by them that that movie sticks in my brain.

I'm going to hypothesize that it's not a coincidence that Monsters probably had a much lower budget than Godzilla.

Correct.

And I think that drives you to be better with the resources you have. Yes, I agree. Okay, moving on to a couple more tropes, John. So we have a trope we have not yet seen in our Zombie Strains movies, but that is pretty common today. It is the Apocalyptic Road Trip.

Yes, I've been waiting for one. I was excited when I saw what was happening in this movie. I was like, it's a road trip. Andy will be so excited because you brought up road trips in other contexts before.

Yeah. Yeah. So this is a trope where the survivors in a zombie apocalypse, they don't or they can't just do the thing they should do, which is just like find the safest place, fortify it and hunker down and just stay there. They are driven to leave safety and they go on a journey, or a quest, you might say, through dangerous territory. So that's clearly present here. And the last one I want to talk about before we move into spoiler territory, John, is this the trope that we are starting to see hints of it, I think, in our movies in the zombie movies from the 50s and 60s of survivors with personal agendas that are often hidden from each other.

Yes. And I think this is important because I think what also is featured here is unresolved. This movie is all about unresolved issues for every single character in it, and it's about regret. And so it's really about all of these, taking care of these personal things through the prism of the zombie genre, right? This movie's first priority is not to make a zombie movie. This movie's first priority is to talk about these relationships. You could have chosen, I think the zombie stuff in here is great, but you could have chosen aliens if you wanted to. I mean, you could have done this a number of different ways. It was really about having people separated and having unresolved issues between them and having to try to figure out how to solve that.

Exactly. And it creates, I mean, there's a reason this is such a much used thing. Like Walking Dead is full of this. I mean, shows like Battlestar Galactica really brought this to the fore, I think. I think this idea that you're all in the same team. Maybe you've been pursuing the same objective, but because you're doing it for different reasons, you maybe can't trust everyone is going to make the decisions you would want them to. Right. So Ava has a personal agenda here. It's to look for her husband and she hides that kind of from her superiors. Clay has a personal agenda that's maybe less dramatic than Ava's, but it does come out in the end. We'll talk about it when we end after the spoiler, after we crossed the spoiler chasm or whatever we're calling it.

Spoiler barrier.

That's right. And then one of the other characters, Riley, that she encounters has his own reasons for doing what he's doing that are not clear immediately when he first meets. So okay, John, let's declare that we're crossing into the spoiler zone now.

It is spoiler time, everybody. Yeah. And I would like to offer, sometimes, I do this with movies sometimes. So let me just say this really quick. Sometimes you know you're not going to see a movie, and it's just fun to hear about it. I always like to hear about movies I know I'm not going to see. So this is absolute spoilers. If you want to see it, maybe don't listen. But if you're just curious about the movie, you know, listen, it might be enjoyable rather than having to see the whole thing.

So yeah, and this isn't like a what is like an M. Night Shyamalan. Like if you hear the twist, you might as well not watch the movie.

It's not like that at all.

Yeah. Okay. So John, the first of our spoilery tropes that I flagged is one we have not seen yet. I don't think in our regular movies we've been watching. So we're up to 1964.

Correct.

And this hasn't come up. We have Zombie Pregnancy and Pregnancy Horror.

We had it. And now technically, we had it in Girl With All The Gifts, but we watched that out of sequence, right?

Yes.

And it was in 28. I'm spoiling everything, by the way. It was in 28 years later as well.

Yeah. So this is based on very limited research, and I actually hope we'll be proven wrong here because I love learning that tropes popped up earlier than I realized.

Yeah, that's been one of the joys of this podcast, actually.

I know that by the time we get to 1978, George Romero's Dawn of the Dead features a pregnant survivor.

Right.

And her pregnancy is very explicitly part of the horror of the situation because you, the viewer, are invited along with the characters to wonder what that means. Is like first, and pregnancy, there's a lot of levels of the pregnancy horror. First, it's just simply scary to be pregnant in a disaster, in an apocalyptic environment. Yep. And secondly, you have this awful question of like, what if the baby is a zombie? What if I become a zombie? What will happen to my baby? I mean, it's deeply uncomfortable and I think there are some directors that really love to twist the knife of this type of horror. And of the movies we've watched, John, none have feed, none chronologically up through the 1960s have had pregnancy horror.

No, there was suggestion.

There was some in the Dawn of the Dead remake by Zack Snyder in the early 2000s. That has a really gross zombie pregnancy sequence. So what do you think, John? I mean, where we're watching movies in the 60s, I mean, I think, I think like I Love Lucy still can't say the word pregnant on the screen.

I think not. And in fact, one of the other things I'll just spoil really quickly here is that the relationship drama between, it takes most of the movie to find this out, between Ava and Mitch is that she had an affair just before he left or she told him about one. That's the only twist in this movie kind of. And it is revealed through flashbacks, but it's revealed late in the movie. So this is also our first movie where sexuality and affairs and anything other than just pure, straightforward Christian marriage is a thing.

Yes.

You know?

Yes, and we might as well talk about that now. I really liked how they slowly unfolded the story of Daisy's relationship with her husband. So when the movie starts, she's seeking her husband, and you just assume, well, I mean, she loves her husband. That's why she wants to find him. Find him, right? But as, and through flashbacks, we get these glimpses of sort of milestones in their relationship. We see them when they're married, we see their early married life, we see them having a great time.

We see them trying to get pregnant and failing, which is huge.

Yes. We see all of these really stereotyped moments, I would say. But towards the end of the movie, I will say, if you were to guess, like, an iMovie viewer, if I were to guess, like, who is going to take the action that's going to, like, really damage this relationship, I would guess it would be the man. And you can say I've got a bias there. But this movie's kind of twist is that it's Ava, who she had a one-night stand with somebody. She appears to have felt horrible about it and wanted to talk to her husband about it, but he had to leave on this business trip, like right when this was happening. And so her whole the state and the future of her marriage and her relationship with this man is just in limbo maybe forever, because that was the last time she saw him. Was the conversation of we have to talk about this, maybe when you get back from your business trip.

And I want to contrast other people's issues here, like because what happens early on is she shows up and has a female partner, and Clay shows up and he has a male partner. Both of their partners drop out, Mitch or Clay's partner is just, he can't take it. There's an interesting thing is that Ava's original partner, she does the character doesn't even have a name, but she's sort of giving her life story and she's like, well, you know, I wanted to show my girls, you know, my children, that what it means to be a good citizen and help out. And then after their first encounter, not even with a zombie, just with some dead bodies, she comes running out of the house and she's like, I have to go be with my girls. And she puts her hands up and leaves immediately. You know what I mean? So that sort of gives you a warning that the stakes for Daisy must be something more than simple, familiar, not that that's not a lot, but simple, familiar relationships. Because she obviously hates the experience too, but has no thought of quitting.

Yes. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit more detail in a minute, when we talk about like how these zombies work, because it's actually quite connected to the way Daisy's story unfolds.

Right.

So we have the zombie pregnancy trope. We also have a trope that we can't be in the sixties. We cannot be too far from this, John, the crazed survivor trope.

Yes.

And this is where you come across somebody who, uh, may appear to be an ally. They're a fellow human being in a zombie world, right? And they maybe even look normal, but it turns out that they have cracked under the strain of this. And in We Bury The Dead, this character is the soldier Riley.

Yes.

Who initially turns up. I mean, he's, there's always a little bit of menace about him, I would say.

Yeah. I think if I have one complaint about his performance, it's that I never for a second thought he wasn't crazy.

You know?

Like, as soon as I saw him, he's got this sort of jittery look to him. And I think that was intentional. I just don't know. Like, I maybe would have dragged it out a little bit.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, in the movie, he's got a gun and I don't think Daisy feels like she has much of a choice. But she encounters this soldier who's inexplicably down in the infection zone all by himself.

Yes. And you don't realize this at first. Like, he saves Riley and Clay from a zombie. He shoots a zombie. And then we're like, whoo, it's a soldier. And then you realize like there's like his uniforms disheveled and there's like some blood on it. And like, yes, like something's not right here. And I want to say one thing this movie does really well up to this point is building tension. And we'll talk about this more about the how the dead come back when we get to that section. But this also like, like the tension really builds in this scene as as inexplicable things keep happening in in this with Riley around and it keeps getting weirder and weirder.

So yes. Yeah. I mean, just to sum it up. So Riley offers to take Ava to her destination, right?

I think it's called Woodbridge. I think is the name.

Yes, that's right. But instead he takes her to a house that he initially it's out in the boondocks. He initially claims it's like a place where they can just quick get supplies. She learns once she's in there with him that it's his house and he's a picture of him and his wife there. Yeah. And he's just stark raving crazy. He's got his zombie wife up in the, you know, he's one of those people, the type that keeps their loved ones around as zombies.

And he's captured a bunch of zombies and he's conducting like experiments on them.

Yes. And so she has to kill him to escape. And that whole sequence was pretty great, actually. The movie's strongest single action sequence. This is a movie without a ton of action in it.

Yeah. The creepiest thing, not the scariest thing, but the creepiest thing in this movie is, as she's pulling out of that house after killing him, is this pregnant zombie wife standing in the driveway with her hand on her belly. She's clearly a zombie and she's just looking at Ava as she drives past. And I was like, yeah.

It's a great, it's kind of a jump scare. It's great because she flips on the lights and there's this pregnant, yeah. So I should have specified when we talked about the pregnant zombie trope. Yeah, the pregnant zombie in this movie is Riley's wife. And part of one of the reasons he's cracked is that not only as he lost his wife, but he had invested obviously a lot of hope in their unborn child.

And she came back and she's still pregnant.

Yes. And at the end of the movie, this is actually going to be resolved, although Riley won't be alive to see it. So, all right, so John, so those are the tropes I flagged. Did I miss anything that you were like, oh, they're doing this that we either have seen in our podcast to date or that we are waiting to see?

No, I think the big one is experiment gone awry, right? Like, you know, this could be, this is similar to the trope that starts 28 days later. It's a science experiment gone awry, you know? But I don't, have we seen that? I think we have seen that. I'm trying to remember the origin of the creature with the atom brain. Was that accidental or intentional?

Oh, I don't remember.

I can't remember.

We are close to this. We haven't had anything that's quite like this. Like we turned on the large hadron collider and it turned everyone in Europe into a zombie or whatever. But we are getting close to it, even in like silly stuff like horror at Party Beach, where it's a byproduct of technology.

This is very explicitly though, irresponsible military leadership creating the apocalypse and the zombie horde. So that's, I mean, we don't need to dig into that because I think it's just, again, a MacGuffin for this movie. This movie is not about that at all. But it is a trope we see in it.

So John, lastly, I want us to wrap up by talking about the reason we are discussing this movie. I want to talk about the zombies. So can you just explain with full spoilers in effect, how these zombies work?

It's actually fascinating. So everybody is dead and they look dead. They look horrible, like something horrible has happened to them.

They look dead, they've been like rotting. They don't, they aren't like chewed up and mangled, but they've just have been rotting for a while.

Yes. Lots of people have black skin or their veins are sticking out or, you know, yeah, it's nasty. So when we first see the zombies, they simply get up and they stand there and they just look at you and they don't charge you, they don't say anything to you. As we progress in the film, they do start to exhibit more behaviors. And one is grinding their teeth with this huge clacking sound that we run into that in the last zombie they see before they hit the road. Yes. And then as things go on, actually Riley points this out because he's the weirdo who's been conducting experiments on them, the longer they've been animated, the more agitated they become, which actually ends up not being true. Yeah. But that's his theory. But yeah, so they're just regular people who reanimate and are sort of almost, they describe them as docile at the beginning of the movie. And that goes away, but at the beginning they are. And they're still scary though. The first zombie they run into is somebody who's just standing in a garage covered in motor oil.

It's quite scary actually.

Yeah, it's scary, but it doesn't do anything, right? I also love how they reveal this, like they don't show you one reanimating first. First, she sees another group having discovered a reanimated zombie, and you see that it's killed, but you never see it. And then, this is part of the great tension in the movie, I am just waiting for one of these zombies to wake up on her. And when it finally happens, it's like, ah, yeah, so that was really good. The tension in the first act is killer because of this plot device.

Yeah. And I mean, the question here is, nobody knows why some people are reanimating, but not others.

Right. And it's a very small percentage. It's almost nobody. That's why all the zombies they went into are singular. There's never groups of zombies.

So let's, I want to talk, we do get a hypothesis about why they're reanimating.

Right.

But before we get to that, so how would, if we were doing our, what kind of strain of zombie is this? How would you describe it, John?

I would describe it as a, I'm, they get killed by science, but I don't think they reanimate by science. There's an unsuggested mystical element to this.

I think so too, yes.

That is not explained at all. And actually, one thing I love about this movie is they kind of avoid explaining things.

Yes.

Like at one point, Clay and Ava are reunited at the end, and he says to her, how did you get away from the psychopath? And she says, you go first, because we never see Clay escape Ridley. He just disappears for an act. But then they just pan away, like why bother explained how Ridley got away? That reminds me of, I think it's Star Trek First Contact, but it's one of the next generation movies. They're like, Warf, aren't you usually at DS9? How did you get here? And he says, well, I was temporarily assigned to the, and then the camera pans away to a different conversation. Like at some point we're just like, we don't really care how you escape the psychopath. We've seen all the escaping of psychopaths. We need to in a lifetime in The Walking Dead. So just, he escaped and we don't really care.

So we do get a hypothesis. I think it's stated, is it by Riley who says it? Someone tells Daisy, the ones who come back are people that have unfinished business. Yeah, yep. And that's not like shown to be true, but it certainly informs how you understand.

Like I think the zombies we run into at the end of the movie, who have more character, definitely that feels like the case.

Yes. I think we are meant to believe that that is in fact what's happening. And that does make it a mystical explanation for the zombies.

Yes.

Their emotional lives have not concluded in a satisfying way, so they have to come back to conclude them.

And we see this illustrated in a few ways. She meets in one of the movie's more moving scenes.

I almost cried during this scene. I won't lie.

Yes.

I know which one you're going to talk about.

I'm going to talk about the guy with the family. Yeah. Why don't you describe it?

Okay. You're sure you don't want to? It's pretty good. I'll describe.

Yeah, go for it.

So she is traveling. She ends up having to walk after she escapes the psycho. The road is blocked. She can't get her car around it. So she has to walk a long way and it takes more than a day. So she has to stop for the night. And she finds a secure place. It's just a camper, right? Like a Winnebago. And there are people in it, but she takes them out very respectfully and sort of lays them on the ground next to the trailer. And then locks the door and goes to sleep. And then she, then you hear a roar like a zombie waking up. And, and you see somebody move behind the camper. And she goes out to check on it. And the four people in the camper were a family, a mom, a dad, and two kids. And the father, she's about to kill the father. And she looks at him, but he just turns around and he starts digging a hole to bury his family. And I just thought that was amazing. I don't know how that, you have kids. Did that hit you the same way it hit me?

Oh, totally, yeah, this one pushed my buttons.

Yeah, and he's not aggressive to her at all. And then she helps him, actually. They bury the family. And before it's covered over, he sits on the edge of it, and she hits him with a shovel, and he falls in, and then she buries him too. And that was probably the best part of the movie for me.

Yes, I agree. So, again, these zombies are complicated.

Yes.

Are complicated.

Even in death, we're complicated. I think that's one, actually, do you mind if I dive in here for a second?

Please, yeah.

Because one of the things about zombies is same as storm troopers, right? Like, you can kill them and they become good vehicles for action film because they're fodder because they have no character, they have no essence, they have no personality. And this movie is saying even in death, human beings are complicated.

Yes. So this movie is certainly not the first movie to do it, but it leans heavily into humanizing the zombies. In the opening act, they're going through people's houses hauling out corpses. And this movie makes a very big point of panning across the framed photos in each house. And it will often kind of tease you with a really gross zombie corpse that like Clay is just treating disrespectfully. And then it will pan to a picture of that person in life with their husband or something like that.

The most moving one there is when Clay is bitching up a storm about a really heavy woman that they're trying to drag out of a house. And he's just like, blah, blah, blah. He's so mad. And then they just panned to her getting married, to her picture of her wedding. And she's heavy in that picture too, but she's so humanized in that moment. You're like, oh, I feel bad now. You know what I mean?

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, so the real gut punch though of this, for me, of this being the reason that zombies come back, is that when Ava, so when she reaches the corporate retreat where her husband was at, she finds, and this is the end of the movie, she finds his corpse and he has not come back.

Right.

So what does that mean, John?

Well, she shouts at him. This is probably her most emotional moment. She's like, are you just going to sit there and leave me with this whole mess? You know what I mean? Because she's the one who has unresolved issues.

Yes.

He has moved on. I think if he came back from his trip, he would have left. He was going to leave her. He was done with her. And I think it's kind of cruel in a way. We don't know their relationship, but we know they got married. They both want kids and they can't have them, but they're still young enough to have them. So she finds out he has an affair. Well, he's there probably because he's angry. But you get the sense that if he wanted to come back and sort this issue out based on the family man, we've just seen Barry, his family, then he would animate and do that, and he doesn't.

Yeah, exactly. For him, there isn't any unresolved business. It's Ava who has the unresolved issues that have driven her. And so, and let's talk about how this movie ends then, John. We need to wrap this discussion up. Yeah. But I want to say, because this is a hopeful movie. It is. There is, you know, horror about this sort of thing, you know, can live all anywhere on the spectrum of like nihilism to, you know, hope. And this one, this one is definitely leaning in the hope direction. So can you just describe how it ends?

Yeah. Can I actually, can I talk about one more thing about that before we get there? So as we mentioned, the fear in this movie is really tension building. It is so tense as they're going to these houses that have no electricity with flashlights and trying to find bodies. And you are worried that one of them is going to wake up. And it is really tense. And there's a lot of tension that actually near the end, she finds a bus wreck and a zombie actually tries to sneak up on her. And it is the only real like fast zombie chasing you moment in the movie. All the rest of the zombies, she actually runs into a couple of others, but they're dumb and she dispatches them with ease. This one actually chases her. And when we got to this point, I'm like, oh, thank God, this is familiar. Like I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know who was going to reanimate. I didn't know what was she going to find when she found her husband. But this guy, I'm like, well, this is safe ground. I've seen this a million times. You know what I mean?

I mean, I don't want to say that was a bad scene, but that also is not a scene I would list in this movie is like top five and most tense scenes.

But it was just like, oh, whoo, this is a zombie movie.

Yeah, exactly. All right, so tell us how it wraps up and then let's wrap up our discussion, John.

So Clay and her bury or burn her husband in a boat. They take him to the... Actually, can I just say one thing? There's a weird moment of screwball comedy where they're carrying the husband down to the shore to push him out on a boat and set him on fire and Clay, and they both been drinking through the night, and Clay throws up on the husband. And it was like, Jesus, it's her moment to... Yeah, it's weird. It's a weird placement of comedy because this is generally a very serious movie. Speaking of which, so they are driving back from... They get a car, they're just going to drive back to where they're supposed to be. Emotionally, this is over for Ava, we think. And then in the middle of the road is a zombie standing there. And in fact, Clay goes, you'll move, Ginger. Like he's going to run her over or something. But then who is it, Andy?

It is Riley's zombie wife.

Yes. And what is different about her?

She is no longer pregnant.

Right.

Although she's, there's a lot of blood and stuff like that, that suggests that she has given birth.

Yes. And she just wanders off. And as she wanders off, Daisy can hear crying. And in a very heavy handed metaphor, in a ruined church, Daisy runs there and finds this baby. And the baby is normal. It's not a zombie.

Yes.

And that's how the movie ends.

Yeah.

So, okay. I have thoughts about this movie. And we don't need to talk much longer, but what did you think of it on the whole, and then I want to talk about the ending in particular?

Yeah. So, I really like this movie. Yep. I don't think it's one of the great zombie films of all time. But this is a really well told story. It knows what it's trying to say, and it doesn't step outside.

There's not a lot of waste.

Yeah, exactly. It's a tight film.

And actually, early on, there's a wonderful scene that is an echo later, which this movie does a lot, which most movies do, where she's flown to the island, and the woman she talks to first on the plane says to her, I hear some of them come back. And we realize that's why this woman has come. And they find her son and he isn't animated, and she just breaks down. Yes. Basically saying, I just needed five minutes to tell you how much I loved you. You know what I mean?

Yes. Yeah, I mean, this is a film that is asking, like a good number of films and books have asked, if you have something to say to the people around you, you should say it now. Don't wait, right? Yes. Because you never know when is the last time you'll have a chance to say that to the person, you know? So I don't think I needed the baby ending that felt a little ham-fisted. I didn't hate it. And I liked that the zombie mom's, I mean, that was her unresolved business. I mean, and having given birth, she can just fade off and decay or whatever fate awaits her. I don't think I needed that though for this movie to work for me. It had already worked great for me when this happened.

I think it was one step too many. Like what you want to do, like what this movie does, and what a lot of art does, right, is it creates echoes, right? It presents something and then reframes it later. So when we first meet Riley, we realize he's a psycho because he shot a zombie, but it's not dead, and he slowly kills it by stabbing it in the neck. And that's echoed by Ava doing the same thing to him later. And Ava can't get pregnant.

I didn't actually catch that mirror, but you're totally right.

But Ava's pregnancy and their struggles are echoed by this here. So this presents an opportunity of resolution for Ava. But I think, I don't feel like it was earned, that actually having a baby, I think just having the pregnant zombie as an echo of her own struggles with fertility was enough, and I think the baby was too much. So if I were to, the reason it's not great to me is that, and Ridley's character is psycho from moment one, and I think that could have been, that bit almost, it almost doesn't work, but it does work, right? And it almost didn't because of, he's not a bad actor, but they've asked him to be a psycho from frame one, and I just, I don't know, I think that you could have made a different choice there, I guess.

Agreed. You know, there's one thing we didn't talk about, just the, at one point, they pass Hobart, which is Tasmania's biggest city.

Yes.

And Tasmania, by the way, it's pretty, I mean, there's like half a million people on the entire island.

Yeah, can I say, the other thing is, I don't see a world in which a military government allows, you know, citizens from around the world to do that. I don't know, maybe.

I definitely wondered about that, too.

If it were for rescue operations or something, like when a bunch of firefighters and citizens went to New York after 9-11, like, I could see that, but this is like, I could see the world, I could see the UN organized to take care of this work without, like, regular folks.

I agree. That is something you have to just kind of accept. Yes.

Yeah, that's the, yeah, if you don't accept that premise that they would allow volunteers here, then you're going to struggle.

Yeah, I mean, I...

Because the soldiers are very cavalier. Like, if you see one of them, they're docile, just set up the thing, and then we'll come in and blast them to pieces. Like, were they really docile? Like, why would you do that if they're really docile? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. So, I always want to say that the, they passed the ruin city of Hobart and it looks great.

That was, yeah, there's not a lot of big effect shots in this, but the Hobart one is great, and there's another one, she's walking down a winding ocean side road, and there's a, there's a crashed, the tail of a crashed airliner in the water.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, so, I mean, as for what I think about this movie, so this movie, to me, this movie put into film form the experience of like having a good, long, hard cry about something that you have to just let go in your life, whether it was a relationship that you don't have anymore that you miss. And this movie is about recognizing that part of your life is done, you can't go back, you can't change it, but you do have to move forward. And so you're taking a moment, you're going to cry about it, and then you're going to move on. And to me, I felt that emotion really strongly watching this movie.

I wonder how much that has to do with us being over 50.

Oh, easily. It has a lot to do with it.

And on a personal note, like we don't talk in our lives about detail, but I'll just say like my mother got divorced when she was 40. It wasn't great for her, right? It wasn't a fair. But I don't know that she ever let her anger at my father go. You know what I mean? She never remarried. She never even dated really. And she was angry with him, I think till the day she died. And I think about that a lot. When I think about people, nobody's ever done anything that bad to me. But like when I think about people I'm angry with or people, I often just say to myself like, John, you got to let that go. Because of the example she provided. Like it wasn't like a nightmare or something, I'm not suggesting that. I'm just saying it really moved me because my mother made the opposite choice. Never let it go. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah, thanks for sharing. That is a great insight, yes.

Yeah, so in any case, I say three and a half out of five stars. What do you think?

Yeah, I think I gave it something like that. I might have given it four stars. John, let's wrap up with just our last couple of questions. We always ask three questions at the end of each episode. Let's do it with this one here. All right, so John, here are the three questions we always ask. First, would you and I survive in the zombie world of We Bury The Dead?

As long as we didn't, I mean, everybody on Tasmania died, so excluding people on Tasmania, I think yes. Largely, these zombies are docile. Even if we decided to go on the road trip, I think you could take sufficient care for to not get killed by one of these zombies. Later, they become a bit of a threat, but even then, she runs into one late at the movie. It's actually a wonderful moment. They're in the pool at the resort. They're getting drunk and a zombie runs in and she just hops out of the pool, picks up a whiskey bottle and smashes it to death in the head, and your face is completely fierce and clay is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, settle down. So if Daisy Ridley can kill a zombie with a whiskey bottle, I think we could do it, even at our advanced stage.

I think so too, yes. All right, second question, John, is this a zombie movie or is this a movie with zombies?

I think it's a movie with zombies. It's not really about the zombies. It's about the humans and the guilt and the regrets that they carry and the zombies that are just there to frame those relationships.

I think you're right. I think it could have been something else beside the zombies. I do think the zombies coming back because they have unfinished business is a thematically powerful thing. I thought it was great. It might be hard to pull if it were like aliens or something.

And I think that what's great about that is, again, they don't want to explain it. I can see a certain sort of film fan and nothing against you being like, that's dumb. People just don't come back because they have emotionally unresolved issues. I'm like, no, they don't. In fact, they don't come back at all. That's dumb. If you're going to complain about that, you can complain about the entire genre. So yeah. But no, I think that I actually was really moved by that. Again, it's because we're soft in our old age though, Andy.

Yes. Oh, for sure. We're big softies. All right. And lastly, John, do you recommend this movie? Firstly, generally is a movie that average moviegoer would enjoy. And secondly, do you recommend it specifically to the legion of zombie loving freaks that listen to this podcast?

I'm going to say yes to both. A hard yes to zombie fans, though some of the complaining reviews I read, people said I wanted to see zombie hordes and stuff, and I didn't get that. So if you want to see a different kind of zombie movie as a zombie fan, you should see this movie. Now, I have a caveat to my regular movie answer, which is what the interest, and maybe this is why this movie isn't a bigger hit. I don't know. Maybe it will be. But the kind of person who has to enjoy this movie, A, has to enjoy movies about relationships, right? Because that's the core thing here. And you have to enjoy really tense horror movies, because I think the tension in the beginning of this movie is palpable. And it's hard to find a person who likes both of those things. You know what I mean? Like you and I do. But like my wife would love the relationships part, but she is not here for the zombie part. You know what I mean? So I think it's hard to recommend because you got to know you like both of those things.

I think that's a good way to put it. Yeah, so I would give it kind of a soft... I really like this. I mean, I think it's a good movie. I give it a soft recommend for a general audience for the reasons you just said. And I would give it a stronger recommendation for zombie fans. It doesn't... Not if you are looking for a Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead type of zombie movie. However, it does... I wouldn't say that this like reinvents the zombie or anything like that, but it is just a little different treatment of a very familiar... Our very familiar zombie tropes. It is a little bit different. And when you have hundreds and hundreds of zombie movies, even small little tweaks to the formula, I think tend to stand out and have fun.

And we're in our post... We're post our four pillars, right? Like we could go through the four pillars here, but I think one thing we're learning about later movies is those pillars don't... Like those pillars are designed for a very specific time in zombie movie-dom, sort of like 1978 to 2000, and then maybe 2010. And then after a certain point, this genre is taking off and people are using it like they use, I don't know, action movies to explore different things.

Yes.

And horror has always been good at that, actually. I mean, I'd like to give props to horror.

Oh, for sure.

You know, like, just one last thought. One of the things I like, we talked about this book Scream With Me, which again is political and we're not going to get into the politics of it. But one of the things she says in it that I really like, I read a bit this morning, is people often conflate horror with pornography. And the reason, she says, I think was really insightful, is not because they are depraved or something, it's because both things make you feel feelings in your body very viscerally. And you have a physical reaction to them in a way you don't to, say, romantic comedies. And so, I forget what point I was going to make with that, but that's the gift of horror, right? Is it creates this visual... You are raw and vulnerable after the tension of the first act of this movie, and then the relationship stuff hits harder because of that, I guess is what I'm saying.

Oh, great. Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

Yeah.

All right, John, will you want to sign us off?

All right, everybody, remember, don't tell producer Brad that we were here. And next week, we're going to be watching and talking about the horror at Party Beach. Thanks, everybody. Talk to you soon. You've been listening to Zombie Strains. We'll be back next episode to talk about another zombie movie. If you enjoyed our podcast, please take a moment to rate us in your podcast app of choice. Tell a friend, follow us on Instagram at Zombie Strains. All of this helps like minded people find the show. See you next time.