Australia knows the apocalypse. Here’s another entry in their oeuvre of end of the world madness, one that feels like a collision between a Romero social commentary and a Nicholas Sparks novel that took a very wrong turn into a bio-weapon testing site.

An experimental weapon test off the coast of Tasmania goes south (literally), wiping out Hobart and turning the surviving population into The Empty. They aren’t quite zombies. They’re brain-dead husks until their motor functions kick back in and they start wandering around with a sudden case of the munchies.

Ava Newman (Daisy Ridley) is an American physiotherapist who joins the cleanup crew with a side quest of finding her missing husband, Mitch (Matt Whelan). She teams up with Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a volunteer who looks like he’s got more baggage than a Qantas flight, and they go AWOL on a motorcycle to trek across the Tasmanian wilderness. They soon meet Riley (Mark Coles Smith), a lone soldier who locks Ava in a bathroom, makes her wear his dead wife’s clothes and insists on a slow dance. 

As if that’s not weird all on its own, he’s also preserving his pregnant, undead wife in a shrine, and he’s already felt the baby kick. That’s when everyone learns that the dead — like a father digging a grave for his family — are just finishing out their earthly missions.

Ava finally finds Mitc — SPOILERS –, and we learn their marriage was a wreck of infertility and infidelity. Even worse? Mitch spent his final hours cheating on her. And then Riley’s undead wife — SPOILERS 2: THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL — miraculously and biologically impossible gives n birth to a healthy baby.

This is as much a grief meditation as it is a horror movie. Director and writer Zak Hilditch said that it “…started as an exploration of grief, following the death of my mother, dealing with the trauma of that and finding a way to move through it. I never in a million years thought that, by the end of writing the screenplay, I would have infused it with zombies. But this notion of unfinished business wouldn’t leave me alone.“

We Bury the Dead has some good new ideas amongst the expected zombie moments, even if they’re not zombies. They’re not, totally, right?