This week's Movie Night movie was We Bury the Dead (2025), for some reason, I guess because there are zombies in it. But the heteronormativity is so thick and heavy, you can actually feel it, like an oppressive fog.
The premise: An experimental weapon backfires, zapping the entire island of Tasmania just as everyone is sitting down to breakfast. Every being with a brain drops dead instantly, 500,000 people plus all the cows, horses, pets, and birds.
A few days later, hundreds of volunteers come in from Australia to help the army clear out the dead. The men in line, such as David Genat (left), all tell the registration officer, "I need to find my wife," and women, "I need to find my husband!" Sometimes they're looking for their kids, instead.
Ava (Daisy Ridley) is looking for her husband: he was at a conference in Woodbridge, in the southern part of the island. Unfortunately, she is assigned to a sector in the north, 200 miles away.
Scene after scene of breaking into homes, close ups of photos of smiling nuclear families, bodies of husbands, wives, and kids at the breakfast table, doing cozy family things, kids next to teddy bears. Over and over and over. It's smiling nuclear families everywhere. I wanted to yell "Gay people exist!"
Left: Gender-polarized pink and blue body bags.
Ava is desperate to get to Woodbridge to see if her husband re-animated due to unfinished business. A volunteer named Clay (Brenton Thwaites) offers to help her.
They steal a motorcycle and zoom through the restricted areas, past a lot of wrecked cars -- for some reason, the cars didn't crash when the drivers dropped dead, they just sort of stoppeed.
At the ruins of Hobart, smoke from the many fires is so thick that they have to find gas masks. I guess a lot of people were cooking over open fires when they dropped dead?
Then they break into a diner -- it's only been a few days, so most of the food in the freezer is still good -- and have a heart-to-heart.
Left: Brenton Thwaites butt.
Ava: She can't get pregnant, which caused tension. Then she had an affair, which caused more. Hubbie was thinking of divorce when he headed to the conference.
Clay: His girlfriend and child want nothing to do with him. He thought that he could impress them with his patriotism by volunteering for the clean-up, but they told him to "f*k off."
It is unclear why Clay is helping. Maybe he wants to get with Ava, or maybe he's bonding with her due to their shared marital problems.
I forgot -- some of the dead come back as tooth-clicking zombies. Mostly they just stare. Some attack (racism alert: most of the violent ones are black). Some just have unfinished business, like a nuclear family father wants to bury his wife and kids before he finally crosses over.
More after the break. Caution: Explicit.
