Hulu’s 95-Minute Underrated Horror Movie Is 28 Days Later Meets Warm Bodies

Published Aug 17, 2026, 2:30 PM EDT

Sky Blanton is a Movie Contributor at ScreenRant with professional experience covering movies, television, and pop culture. Her published work spans news, interviews, features, and opinion pieces, with a focus on film, franchise storytelling, and the entertainment industry.

She earned her bachelor's degree in Communications with a concentration in Professional Writing and a minor in Business Writing from Southern New Hampshire University.

There are plenty of zombie movies worth revisiting right now, but one of the best recent ones is still surprisingly overlooked. We Bury the Dead is a 95-minute horror drama starring Daisy Ridley that has the frantic danger of 28 Days Later with the more human undead of Warm Bodies. But We Bury the Dead is doing something much more interesting with its undead than just turning them into another threat for Ava to outrun.

Directed by Zak Hilditch, We Bury the Dead follows Ava Newman (Ridley), a physiotherapist who travels across Tasmania looking for her husband after an experimental American weapon devastates the island. The blast leaves countless people dead, but some victims later regain motor function. They can move, they sometimes follow familiar impulses, and they can become violent. Ava quickly learns that understanding what the undead want can be just as important as figuring out how to survive them.

That gives We Bury the Dead a lot more to work with than another story about people running from corpses. Hilditch uses the undead to explore grief, guilt, marriage, and the things people cannot bring themselves to leave behind. With The Last of Us and 28 Years Later putting zombie and infected stories back in the spotlight, it is a shame We Bury the Dead has not received more fanfare. Its take on the undead is one of the most interesting parts of a genre that has spent decades trying to find new ways to make the dead frightening.

Daisy Ridley Gives A Fantastic Performance In We Bury The Dead

Daisy Ridley is terrific as Ava because she never plays her like a conventional horror heroine. Ava does not know how to fight her way through the apocalypse. She is a woman trying to find her husband, and Ridley makes that desperation visible even when Ava is barely saying anything.

Ava's search becomes increasingly complicated as the movie continues. She begins with the belief that Mitch might still be alive, but her journey forces her to confront the problems that already existed in their marriage. Ridley plays Ava's grief alongside her guilt, creating a character who is not only trying to rescue someone, but also trying to make sense of a relationship that was already falling apart.

Ava is constantly surrounded by bodies, but the movie does not allow her to become numb to them. Every encounter forces her to decide whether the person in front of her is still a person, a threat, or somehow both.

That question becomes far more disturbing when Ava meets Riley, played by Brenton Thwaites. Riley has been studying the undead and believes their behavior is connected to unfinished business. His obsession leads him to keep undead people chained in his shed, including his pregnant wife, Katie.

Riley cannot accept his wife's death, so he creates an entire belief system around the possibility that she is still in there somewhere. Ava eventually has to confront the same question from a very different perspective.

Ava's journey keeps bringing her face-to-face with the same question. How much of a person is left after death? She wants to believe Mitch is still out there, but every encounter with the undead gives her another reason to question what “alive” actually means. Ridley makes that uncertainty the emotional core of the movie.

We Bury The Dead Is A Great Modern Zombie Movie

We Bury the Dead borrows familiar zombie-movie ideas, but Zak Hilditch is not interested in making another movie where the undead exist solely to chase people. Their behavior is what makes them unsettling. Ava cannot always tell whether one is about to attack or is trying to complete something it remembers from life.

The best example comes when Ava encounters an undead father at an abandoned camper. He wakes during the night, picks up a shovel, and starts digging a grave for himself and his family. He does not attack Ava. He keeps digging. Ava eventually helps him finish the grave, after which he allows her to kill him.

That scene is where the Warm Bodies comparison clicks. The 2013 movie explored zombies retaining traces of their humanity, while We Bury the Dead takes the idea somewhere darker. Its undead do not regain their humanity. They appear driven by things they could not finish while alive.

Riley becomes obsessed with this possibility after discovering that some of the dead behave differently from others. He believes the undead have “unfinished business” and applies that theory to his wife, Katie, refusing to accept that she is truly gone.

The movie also recalls 28 Days Later, although Hilditch takes the infected in a very different direction. Danny Boyle's film made its infected terrifying through their speed and aggression. We Bury the Dead can be frighteningly quiet. Sometimes the most disturbing thing an undead person can do is stand there, grinding their teeth or repeating an action from their former life.

We Bury the Dead also arrives at an interesting point for the zombie genre. The Last of Us has made audiences care deeply about the people caught inside an outbreak, while 28 Years Later has brought the terrifying speed and unpredictability of infected humans back to theaters. Hilditch goes in another direction by making the dead themselves worth watching. The father digging his family's grave and Riley's refusal to let go of Katie are not background details.

That is why We Bury the Dead deserves more attention. Its 95-minute runtime leaves little room for the story to wander, and Hilditch uses that time to build an unusual set of rules around the undead. The result is a zombie movie where some of the most memorable scenes have nothing to do with escaping a horde. Ava watching the dead carry out the final pieces of their lives is far more haunting than another chase sequence could have been.

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  Ava

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  Clay

We Bury the Dead follows Ava as she enters a quarantine zone searching for her missing husband amidst a military disaster. Contrary to military assurances, she discovers the undead are becoming increasingly violent, relentless, and dangerous, presenting a chilling ordeal for survivors.