We Bury the Dead

An accidentally detonated American experimental weapon off the eastern coast of Tasmania obliterates Hobart and leaves countless people brain dead rather than simply killed. In the weeks after, some of the brain-dead inexplicably regain motor function and become a kind of undead — sometimes slow and passive, sometimes violent. The military quietly insists the situation is controllable and the undead mostly harmless, while sending units into the quarantine zone to retrieve bodies and put down anything that gets back up.

Ava Newman, an American physiotherapist, volunteers for an Australian military body-recovery team operating in the north of the island. Her real motive is to work her way south toward Woodbridge, where her husband Mitch was attending a business conference when the weapon went off. Through flashbacks we learn their marriage was strained over their inability to conceive; under the pressure Ava had an affair, which Mitch discovered just before he left, and her grief is laced with guilt.

On the team Ava is paired with Clay, a rough handyman trying to redeem himself after his wife and daughter cut him out of his life. Their work — tagging corpses and calling in soldiers to neutralise the ones that wake — increasingly contradicts the official line: some reanimated victims move with purpose, show flashes of memory, and behave like they are trying to finish something. When Ava and Clay find a working motorcycle, she convinces him to desert the unit and drive south with her.

At an abandoned petrol station they are attacked by a fast, animated corpse. A lone soldier named Riley arrives, kills it, and during the confusion separates them — locking Ava in a bathroom and telling her, when she wakes, that Clay has run off and abandoned her. Riley offers to escort her to Woodbridge but instead drives her to his isolated house. Over a meal he opens up about losing his pregnant wife Katie and their children in the blast.

Riley's grief has gone septic. He asks Ava to put on Katie's clothes and dance with him; he insists she remove her wedding ring. When she does not, he turns. Ava finds Katie's still-pregnant corpse preserved in the marital bed and surrounded by a shrine; in a shed she finds more chained undead and notebooks of Riley's observations. His thesis: only people with 'unfinished business' come back, driven to complete what death interrupted. Ava is just the next subject. She kills Riley in self-defence, takes his car, and flees — catching a final glimpse of Katie now more fully awake.