We Bury the Dead was marketed heavily as a vehicle for Daisy Ridley. Indeed, she’s the only recognizable name attached, with the debatable exception of Brenton Thwaites. Which is hilarious, as Ridley is a Brit in a cast and crew full of Australians. And she’s playing an American, which makes it even funnier.

The plot begins when the USA accidentally detonates an experimental weapon off the coast of Tasmania. As a result, the entire population of the island — roughly half a million people — are instantly killed. Politicians and protestors in Australia and the USA are all calling for accountability from the White House. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the Australian armed forces call for volunteers from the mainland to come to Tasmania. In theory, the volunteers are there to help find, identify, and dispose of 500,000 corpses. In practice, the volunteers are mostly there to find and identify their loved ones. Or maybe they’re thrill-seekers looking for a legal excuse to break shit. One imagines a few are there to try looting, but the film only barely touches on that.

The important thing is that these are civilians. They are not professionals. They are not trained to deal with dead bodies. They are not psychologically equipped to walk through the photos and mementos and homes of people who suddenly dropped dead. They sure as hell aren’t trained to deal with the trauma of witnessing destruction and carnage on such a massive scale. I need hardly add that professionals would know better than to put themselves in a position where their personal feelings and history would get in the way of their goddamn job.

But then comes the kicker: A select few corpses have somehow revived, in such a way that they’re now walking around in a kind of catatonic state. Nobody knows how or why or how long it takes to “come back online”. And eventually, we learn that the longer these zombies go without being killed, the more violent they get.

So, what we’ve got here is a 28 Days Later scenario: Zombie apocalypse on a small quarantined island, and business as usual (more or less) everywhere else. Though it’s worth noting that this particular strain of zombies isn’t caused by a pathogen, so at least our living characters don’t have to worry about turning into a zombie or infecting anyone back on the mainland.

More to the point, this is very much a film about people who lose their minds in the face of a zombie apocalypse, the loss of their loved ones, and living too long in a place where society has effectively ceased to exist. There is, however, a crucial difference between this movie and 28 Days Later: these characters have a ride off the island. They were brought here by the government, and the government can simply take them back at any time.

What we’ve got here is a zombie flick that’s much more interested in the mental/emotional threat of the zombie apocalypse, rather than the physical threat. Which is a significant reason why the jump scares and action sequences are uniformly pitiful. That said, while zombies have traditionally been a symbol of death itself, these particular zombies are more like ghosts. They are the images and memories of those who died in this mass casualty event, lingering long enough for the living to reckon with them. It’s a neat concept, and a secondary meaning for the title.

But then we have our protagonist. Ridley plays Ava Newman, a physical therapist whose husband (Mitch, played by Matt Whelan) was last seen going to Tasmania on a work retreat. I might add that the work retreat was at a luxury resort on the south end of the island, which puts it directly at the epicenter of the blast. And now Ava has flown all the way to Tasmania so she can join the volunteer effort in a transparent attempt at finding her husband.

The same husband who was last seen within shouting distance of an event that instantly killed every living thing on the entire island. Which means that he’s either dead, or a catatonic vegetable, and the list of possible outcomes only gets worse from there.

Look, I get that the film is trying to make a statement about the compulsive need for closure in response to grief. The problem is that we’re stuck watching a protagonist who’s chasing after something that she has zero chance of ever getting. We know from the outset that she’s never getting reunited with her husband. And the longer the film goes on, Ava goes to increasingly suicidal lengths in pursuit of a happy ending that’s increasingly unlikely. (Remember, it’s clearly shown and stated that the zombies get more violent as more time passes.)

So we’re stuck watching a miserable film as it trudges along to a downer conclusion that everyone saw coming 90 minutes ago. That’s a big fucking problem.

Granted, the film does have a few neat surprises here and there. The ending drags on quite a bit, but that’s in the service of a few small twists I genuinely didn’t see coming. We also get a zombie that’s sincerely benign, that was interesting.

Unfortunately, for all these little flourishes, We Bury the Dead never gets any more interesting than the first ten minutes. The premise is fascinating, but the whole movie is consistently undercut with the knowledge that all of these characters are perfectly free to leave the island and go back to their totally intact homes at any time. Furthermore, the basic notion of zombies as a one-and-done event, with no possibility that any more could ever be created, makes them significantly less threatening.

Yes, I understand and admire how this film so badly wants to use zombies as a metaphor for unfinished business and the loved ones we never got to say goodbye to. But it’s all for naught when we’re stuck with a protagonist whose motivation is not proportionate to the obstacles in her way. And when so much of the movie is so lamentably predictable, a few meager climactic curveballs won’t be enough to make up for so much of the runtime. Especially when the jump scares feel like they were spliced in after last-minute reshoots and the action scenes are so terribly shot and cut.

It sucks that the film plays like a watered-down 28 Days Later ripoff when it had the potential to be so much more (and the actual franchise has a new entry coming out in a few weeks), but here we are. The film is a fascinating yet failed experiment, destined for awards-season obscurity. Here’s wishing better luck next time for all involved.