JP Nunez
I was super excited to watch Burial. I first heard about this movie a bit over a month ago, and I was really intrigued by it. According to the official plot synopsis, this was a pretty straightforward World War II thriller, but the trailer made me wonder if there was more to it than the marketing was letting on. It seemed like there was a supernatural element to the film as well, so I couldn’t wait to find out the truth.
Burial was directed by Ben Parker, and it stars Harriet Walter, Tom Felton, Charlotte Vega, and Bill Milner. It’s about a small group of Russian soldiers during World War II who are charged with taking Hitler’s corpse to Russia, but on the way there, they’re attacked by German Wehrwolf fighters who want to keep the truth about their dead leader under wraps.
Now, if you don’t know what a Wehrwolf fighter is, you’re not alone. I had never heard of them either until I learned about this movie, and I was disappointed to find out that they’re not actual lycanthropes. Rather, they’re German resistance fighters who operated behind enemy lines, so there’s nothing supernatural about them. They’re just regular human beings, so like I said, the official plot synopsis makes this film out to be a fairly normal war thriller.
But I wasn’t entirely convinced. Not only did the trailer seem to imply otherwise, but the first 10 minutes of Burial also gave me reason to doubt that this movie would be entirely naturalistic. The film employs a framing device set in 1991, so it actually begins with an elderly lady who we soon learn is the lone surviving member of this band of Russian soldiers. She ends up telling someone her story, and the way she introduces it implies that it’s pretty wild. So naturally, I saw that as confirmation of my suspicion, and I was excited to see what surprises this movie had in store.
Now, what I’m going to say next might seem like somewhat of a spoiler at first, but I don’t think it is. I’ll explain why in a bit, but if you want to avoid even the slight possibility of a spoiler, skip ahead three paragraphs. Soon enough, when the Wehrwolf fighters begin attacking the Russian soldiers, it looks like there are in fact real monsters here. For example, you hear some really creepy growling, and you even see what appears to be a real werewolf, but you learn very quickly that it’s just due to a mind-altering gas. There’s nothing supernatural going on here, so this is very much the down-to-earth World War II thriller the marketing made it out to be.
Like I said, I don’t think that’s a spoiler, and before I go on, I want to explain why. While I suspected that there might be something supernatural going on here, I don’t think the movie really wants us to believe that. Sure, there are a few minutes when it seems like the Wehrwolf fighters are legit lycanthropes, but Burial explains their true nature very soon after those initial misdirects. It doesn’t try to trick you for very long, so the way I see it, the truth about these people isn’t a real spoiler.
Now, since I was hoping for a monster movie, I found that truth a bit disappointing, but I didn’t let it ruin the movie for me. I just let the film be what it was, and I tried my best to judge it on its own terms without penalizing it for not living up to my own crazy theories.
And unfortunately, Burial simply did not work for me. In particular, I just couldn’t bring myself to root for any of the characters. To begin, the antagonists are obviously painted as the bad guys, so I wasn’t going to root for them. Not only do they attack and murder people who are more or less just minding their own business, but they’re also Nazis, so of course I wasn’t going to sympathize with them in any way.
And the protagonists aren’t much better. They’re Stalinists, and even though I’m no history expert, one thing I do know is that Stalin was arguably even worse than Hitler. So again, I’m not going to root for people who follow him. Granted, one of the characters, an intelligence officer named Brana Vasilyeva, seems like a fairly good person, but I still had trouble getting on board with her.
She’s super committed to their mission, but Burial never made me believe that it was worth risking their lives. I get that these are soldiers with orders, so they have to do what they’re told, but if a movie wants me to sympathize with characters and genuinely root for them, I need to buy into their mission. I need to believe in it as much as they do, and I just never did.
Because of all that, I couldn’t connect with these characters in any meaningful way, so I didn’t care what happened to them. That killed any interest I had in the story, so by the time the film ended, I just shrugged my shoulders and moved on with my life.
All that being said, I do have to acknowledge that Burial isn’t a terrible movie. It has its strong points as well, and some of them are even really good. In particular, the war action is pretty thrilling, and the performances are all quite convincing. So even though I didn’t like the movie overall, it does have some redeeming qualities.
But at the end of the day, those redeeming qualities aren’t nearly enough to change my opinion about Burial. Like I said, I simply wasn’t able to get on board with any of the characters, so I just couldn’t care about the story. After a while, even the film’s strengths became little more than visual noise to me, so I’m sad to say that it left me pretty disappointed.
Burial premiers at Arrow Video FrightFest on August 29, and it’ll be released to the general public next month. It hits VOD on September 2 in the United States and September 26 in the UK.
