Bury Your Dead (2024) Review
Bury Your Dead (2024) Review
Marco Dutra’s adaptation of Ana Paula Maia’s novel straddles Western grit and cosmic dread, tracing Edgar Wilson’s desperate attempt to reclaim his lover from an apocalyptic cult.
With Selton Mello and Marjorie Estiano delivering powerhouse performances, BURY YOUR DEAD transforms Brazil’s desolate backroads into a purgatorial frontier where devotion, despair, and the uncanny collide. From the co-director of 2017’s GOOD MANNERS (As Boas Maneiras).
Synopsis: Edgar Wilson, a roadkill collector, dreams of escaping his small-town existence with Nete, the love of his life. When Nete decides to join her family in an apocalyptic cult, Edgar finds himself at a crossroads. With the world on the brink of destruction, Edgar and his unlikely companion Tomás – a disgraced and excommunicated priest – embark on a dangerous road trip through a landscape plagued by chaos and despair. As they navigate through the remains of civilization, Edgar must confront his inner demons and reconcile his past.
Bury Your Dead is arthouse horror that ultimately gets lost in its own indulgence and self-importance. It opens with enough intrigue to suggest an unsettling journey ahead. While not immediately gripping, the premise is compelling enough to encourage patience. Unfortunately, that patience is rewarded with very little.
At just over two hours, the film becomes an increasingly arduous watch. Its deliberate pacing gradually gives way to stagnation, with the narrative seemingly content to drift rather than develop. There are flashes of striking visual invention—most memorably a hillside strewn with the bodies of countless dead sheep—but moments like these are too infrequent to sustain interest.
The central premise is undeniably promising. Edgar Wilson, a roadkill collector in rural Brazil, dreams of escaping his small-town existence with his girlfriend, Nete. She, however, chooses a different path, electing to remain with her family and embrace an apocalyptic cult. Rather than exploring the fascinating implications of this setup, the film instead follows Edgar as he embarks on a road trip with Tomás, an excommunicated priest. Much of their journey consists of repetitive arguments and simmering hostility, making the narrative feel as though it is running out of road long before the destination is reached.
Bury Your Dead occupies an uneasy space between apocalyptic horror, psychological drama and religious allegory, yet these elements never fully coalesce into a satisfying whole. The film introduces a wealth of intriguing ideas but rarely commits to developing them, leaving its themes frustratingly underexplored. Its ambiguity feels less like a deliberate artistic choice and more like an unwillingness to provide narrative or thematic cohesion.
Visually, however, the film is difficult to fault. Rui Poças’ lush, atmospheric cinematography lends the landscape an eerie, almost otherworldly beauty, frequently elevating scenes that otherwise lack dramatic momentum. His photography gives Bury Your Dead a distinctive visual identity, but even such accomplished craftsmanship cannot compensate for a screenplay that feels undernourished. The film simply needs more substance to match its style.
Premiering at the Sitges Film Festival in 2024 before earning competition slots at the BFI London Film Festival and the Tokyo International Film Festival, Bury Your Dead certainly arrived with considerable festival pedigree. Yet despite its artistic ambition and impressive visual presentation, it ultimately proves too opaque for its own good. It throws an abundance of ideas at the screen but offers too little insight to bind them together, resulting in a film that is visually compelling but emotionally distant and dramatically unsatisfying.
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