Released on Jan. 2, 2026, the film “We Bury The Dead” made its way to theaters with high anticipation and excitement from me. Noticing how the film earned an impressive score of 86 percent by Rotten Tomatoes, I was looking forward to seeing the film to begin the new year. However, to say that I was disappointed would be an understatement…
Telling the story of a young woman who volunteers to help clean up a city following a military disaster that left thousands of people suddenly dead. Wanting to find her late husband, who was caught in the military disaster, the young woman ventures off to find her husband and seek closure following his death. However, some of the bodies left following the military disaster were rumored to suddenly awake and chase after the living, which presents a great challenge for the main character.
While the plot of the story was not exactly original, I was still interested in seeing what direction the story would take that would set the film apart from similar films… My hopes were then dashed after seeing the film. While there’s nothing wrong with the setup, the film does nothing new with the concept, making the movie formulaic and predictable. Consequently, with its predictability, the film, after a while, became very boring to watch due to the fact that you saw everything coming from a mile away. Why watch something that you have seen a thousand times?
This moves me to my next point. With the film’s dullness and predictability, this also hinders the movie due to the fact that it is unable to get out of the shadow of other, and arguably better movies. Especially classic films like “Night of the Living Dead” released in 1968, “Dawn of the Dead” released in 1978, and even most recently “28 Years Later,” released in 2025, the film takes many different components and mashes them together with the hopes of creating something different. However, this only makes the issues in the film more and more glaring, highlighting where this film failed, where the other three films succeeded.
To conclude my final thoughts on the film, I will highlight the title of this article: We Bury The Dead: The Movie Dead On Arrival.
