This week's Movie Night movie was We Bury the Dead (2025), for some reason, I guess because there are zombies in it. But the heteronormativity is so thick and heavy, you can actually feel it, like an oppressive fog.
Link to the n*de photos
The premise: An experimental weapon backfires, zapping the entire island of Tasmania just as everyone is sitting down to breakfast. Every being with a brain dies instantly, 500,000 people plus all the cows, horses, pets, and birds.
A few days later, hundreds of volunteers come in from Australia to help the army clear out the dead. The men in line, such as David Genat (left), all tell the registration officer, "I need to find my wife," and women, "I need to find my husband!" Sometimes they're looking for their kids, instead.
Ava (Daisy Ridley) is looking for her husband: he was at a conference in Woodbridge, in the southern part of the island. Unfortunately, she is assigned to a sector in the north, 200 miles away.
Scene after scene of breaking into homes, close ups of photos of smiling nuclear families, bodies of husbands, wives, and kids at the breakfast table, doing cozy family things, kids next to teddy bears. Over and over and over. It's smiling nuclear families everywhere. I wanted to yell "Gay people exist!"
Left: Gender-polarized pink and blue body bags.
Ava is desperate to get to Woodbridge to see if her husband re-animated due to unfinished business. A volunteer named Clay (Brenton Thwaites) offers to help her.
They steal a motorcycle and zoom through the restricted areas, past a lot of wrecked cars -- for some reason, the cars didn't crash when the drivers dropped dead, they just sort of stoppeed.
At the ruins of Hobart, smoke from the many fires is so thick that they have to find gas masks. I guess a lot of people were cooking over open fires at the moment they died?
Then they break into a diner -- it's only been a few days, so most of the food in the freezer is still good -- and have a heart-to-heart.
Brenton Thwaites' backside is on RG Beefcake and BoyfriendsAva: She can't get pregnant, which caused tension. Then she had an affair, which caused more. Hubbie was thinking of divorce when he headed to the conference.
Clay: His girlfriend and child want nothing to do with him. He thought that he could impress them with his patriotism by volunteering for the clean-up, but they told him to "f*k off."
It is unclear why Clay is helping. Maybe he wants to get with Ava, or maybe he's bonding with her due to their shared marital problems.
I forgot -- some of the dead come back as tooth-clicking zombies. Mostly they just stare. Some attack (racism alert: most of the violent ones are black). Some just have unfinished business, like a nuclear family father wants to bury his wife and kids before he finally crosses over.
More after the break.
Suddenly a soldier Riley (Mark Coles Smith) saves them from a rampaging zombie, then arrests them for being in the restricted zone. He locks Ava in the bathroom overnight, then tells her that Clay has run off. He'll drive her to Woodbridge, but first they need to "make a short stop." It turns out to be his in-law's house (cue the close up photos of an idyllic nuclear family and various "man and woman in love" tchochkes).
Now it hasn't been a few days since the catastrophe, it's been months, and Riley has gone crazy. He keeps zombies chained in his shed to research what caused the re-animation. He keeps his dead, heavily pregnant wife in her room to worship. And he wants Ava to put on her dress and wedding ring and pretend to be her. After fights, chases, and screaming, she manages to incapacitate him, take his keys, and drive on.
At the resort, Ava discovers that her husband (Matt Whelan, left) didn't re-animate. Plus he had spent the night with a lady before being zapped, so he didn't plan on reconciling, he didn't have unfinished business, and Ava doesn't get closure.
But on the bright side, Clay is there. They party, and maybe do bedroom stuff -- it's not clear, but really, nothing in this movie is clear, except that husbands, wives, and kids are universal human experience.
They give Hubbie a Viking burial at sea and head back to the northern sector.
On the way, they see a zombie standing in the road. It's Soldier Riley's wife! She leads them to the back, where she has given birth to a reanimated baby. So she carried to term while dead, then stood for days on an empty road, hoping that someone would stop by? And the reanimated baby didn't need to be fed?
No way. This is ridiculous. Willing suspension of disbelief out the window. But if you read the movie as about marital troubles, not zombies, Ava has managed to get a new husband figure and baby, so heteronormativity is triumphant. The end.
Beefcake: Clay is shirtless a lot. Riley the Soldier never takes his shirt off.
My Grade: F
Left: All this and no Tasmania, so here's downtown Hobart. And a cute guy doing adult stuff (below).
No comments:
Post a Comment
No offensive, insulting, racist, or homophobic comments are permitted.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.