Zak Hilditch’s Australian disaster feature “We Bury the Dead” wrestles with how much it wants to be a zombie movie. It’s at its most interesting and exciting when it approaches the well-worn subgenre with brand-new spins, resulting in haunting scenes that open a cinematic window into the darkest, most mysterious parts of the human condition. Unfortunately, it keeps swerving back toward traditional horror territory at breakneck speed, resulting in a lopsided structure and half-baked philosophical musings clashing against riveting dramatic moments.

Making use of its minimal budget, “We Bury the Dead” creates an immediate sense of scale and spectacle, starting with its central premise, in which the United States accidentally deploys an experimental weapon of mass destruction off Australia’s southern coast. The large-scale Emp has caused up to half a million people to drop dead by shutting down their brains — only for reasons unknown, some of them come“back online,...