Appropriately, zombie movies will never die. The resurgence of this particular horror subgenre might be past its Walking Dead–fueled peak, but there’s clearly an enduring, primal power to the undead shuffling their way across the terrain. There are a lot of plausible explanations for this resonance. The new film We Bury the Dead, written and directed by Zak Hilditch, makes the argument that it’s the harrowing pain of the grieving process that keeps the effectiveness of zombie tales evergreen.

Daisy Ridley stars as Ava Newman, a young wife whose husband (Matt Whelan) was on a business trip to Tasmania when a weapon of mass destruction was detonated there, killing all the people in the region. Ava goes to the island herself, volunteering for a large team charged with retrieving and disposing of the corpses. During an initial briefing, she and her cohorts learn that an indeterminate number of those felled by the bomb are mysteriously reanimating, albeit with a drastically compromised consciousness. Like others around her, Ava is there precisely because of that possibility. She comes not to bury Mitch but to raise him.

These are interesting ideas, a notch or two above what might reasonably be expected from a horror movie that is designed to be a more refined version of bygone Ozploitation romps. What promise there is to the film is undone by the thinness of the characterizations. Most of the people encountered by Ava, including the brash Aussie (Mark Coles Smith) who’s her most dependable traveling companion, rarely progress past being hollow types. Although Ava’s motivations are clearly spelled out and given shades of complication by flashback scenes that dig into her marriage, she feels distant. It doesn’t help that Daisy Ridley plays most scenes, even those in which she’s confronted with horrific dangers, with the placid gaze of someone who’s bored at the zoo.

Ambition doesn’t automatically equal achievement. Hilditch arguably strives for a more meaningful zombie movie with We Bury the Dead. Then again, maybe he simply needed some human drama to help fill the time between spooky set pieces and memorably unsettling audio effects of grinding teeth. Either way, the film shuffles nowhere not so fast.