Who needs a lightsaber when you’ve got a trusty ol’ axe to swing around? Daisy Ridley will pick up the gleaming blade again in a future Star Wars movie, but first she’ll chop up the undead in the upcoming survival thriller, We Bury the Dead, from Australian director Zak Hilditch.
Hitting theaters next January, a prime spot for horror, We Bury the Dead stars Ridley in the role of a desperate woman who joins a body retrieval unit, hoping to find her husband alive after a disastrous military experiment destroys the population of Tasmania. As she sifts through the corpses, she discovers that many are not quite dead. As she journeys south, she must make peace with her own unfinished business in the face of futility.
Joining Ridley in the cast are Brenton Thwaites (Titans) and Cole Smith. The film marks Hilditch’s fourth feature. His most recent film, Rattlesnake, was released in 2019 and starred Theo Rossi and Carmen Ejogo. He also directed two other horrors: These Final Hours in 2013 and an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1922, which arrived in 2017.
Ridley had this to say about working with Hilditch: “Zak has created a unique, terrifying tale about the undead and how far the living will go to reunite with their loved ones. I was thrilled to be part of bringing this nightmare to life and I can’t wait to share the movie with the world.”
SYNOPSIS: After a catastrophic military disaster, the dead don’t just rise – they hunt. The military insists they are harmless and slow-moving, offering hope to grieving families. But when Ava (Daisy Ridley) enters a quarantine zone searching for her missing husband, she uncovers the horrifying truth: the undead are growing more violent, more relentless, and more dangerous with every passing hour.
We Bury the Dead hits theaters on January 2nd 2026 from Vertical.
