At this point, the zombie genre is done to death and there's no chance that someone will come up with a fresh take on the genre. Or so I thought until I watched the Australian film We Bury the Dead, by Zak Hilditch and starring Daisy Ridley. And it's a decent one, carefully avoiding the pitfalls of the genre trope and being too sentimental.
The premise is that an American military sonar/soundwave bomb experiment detonated in Tasmania and wiped out the people/animal population of the island. It affected the brain cells. The south side of the island is codoned off as the middle part is still burning. But there are reports that some of the people who fell dead are coming alive and the military is deployed to execute them on site because first, they are not the same anymore, and over time they become violent.
Ava (Ridley) lands on the island as a volunteer for the body recovery effort. But the real reason is to go to the south of the island, where her husband went to the work retreat. After encountering some undead, who seem to be more cognizant than she initially thought, she teams up with a young man with a chip on his shoulder, Clay (Brenton Thwaites) to head down south with a motorcycle. They witness the pure hellscape at the epicenter of the military experiment that took place, encounters a creepy soldier who has other plans to revive his pregnant wife and barn full of chained zombies and escape.
The fun part of the film is when Ava and Clay get to their resort destination and let their inhibitions go and just start enjoying their surroundings. Ava and her now dead husband had a big fight and he apparently was having an affair. Hilditch foregoes all the drama and genre traps - We Bury the Dead was not a tearful, love-conquers-all story nor time-ticking virus containment story. It's a fresh take on the genre and more down to earth relatable film- because all the characters are motivated by somewhat selfish, personal reasons rather than heroics that require self-sacrifices. We Bury the Dead is sufficiently creepy and scary, but also thoughtful and funny. It has more common with what George Romero's hinting at with his zombie series over decades - that zombies have grown consciousness and acting more like humans and humans regress to zombie states.
