Whatever Happened to ... Daisy Ridley?

I get the uneasy sense that Daisy Ridley is destined to become the Mark Hamill of her Star Wars trilogy: an actress who rockets to superstardom on the back of a massive franchise, only to spend the next few decades bouncing between B-movies and voice work before eventually clawing back a diluted version of that original fame. I don’t fully understand why the industry works this way. Ridley clearly has the talent. And yet, in the seven years since Rise of the Skywalker, she’s made roughly eight films I’ve never heard of and logged voice work for half a dozen video games, podcasts, and animated projects, while Adam Driver gets to be the Harrison Ford of the trilogy, stacking prestige roles like cordwood.

Ridley’s latest is We Bury the Dead, another low-budget genre exercise that at least boasts a genuinely terrific trailer, one that briefly convinced me, alongside the revived 28 Days franchise, that zombie movies might finally be staging a comeback. So much for that. The film scraped together $3.7 million at the box office last month before being quietly ushered onto digital.

The trailer, it turns out, is substantially better than the movie itself. This is not the propulsive, action-forward zombie thriller the marketing promised. Instead, it’s a somber grief drama, competently shot by writer-director Zak Hilditch, using a zombie-adjacent apocalypse as emotional wallpaper.

Here’s the setup: After the U.S. accidentally detonates an experimental weapon off the coast of Tasmania, Hobart is effectively wiped off the map. Those not killed in the initial blast are left brain-dead. Ridley plays Ava Newman, who volunteers to help bury the thousands of bodies alongside Clay (Brenton Thwaites), a local beach-bum type with quiet-sad-eyes energy. Soon enough, they discover that some of the deceased aren’t entirely deceased.

Ava is driven by the need to find her husband, from whom she last separated under messy circumstances, hoping for some measure of closure. She believes he might be among the victims who retain limited cognitive function. What she and Clay learn, however, is that the longer these otherwise docile “zombies” linger, the more agitated and hostile they become. In theory, this is where the movie should pivot into something tense and terrifying. In practice, it never quite gets there.

Because despite flirting with the idea of fast zombies, We Bury the Dead never commits. The creatures remain mostly passive and easily dispatched, save for a couple of brief moments that mildly inconvenience Ava. The pacing is glacial, though the Australian landscapes are undeniably striking. As a meditation on grief, it feels thin and underdeveloped, despite Ridley doing solid work with what she’s given. Hilditch also feels constrained by budget limitations, but that only underscores the film’s biggest problems: it needs more zombies. More tension. More stakes. And frankly, a husband actually worthy of mourning (their marriage was falling apart largely because he was kind of a douchebag).

It’s not the worst way to spend ninety minutes, but it’s undeniably a letdown, and another underwhelming mile marker in Ridley’s post-Star Wars career. Which is frustrating, because you can see the talent right there on screen. One suspects that, years from now, she’ll be “rediscovered” and properly appreciated. Until then, she seems stuck in cinematic purgatory, waiting for another Star Wars trilogy to resurrect her star.