For Ridley, the idea was so compelling that she agreed to the half simply 48 hours after receiving the script. “I’m a fast reader, apparently,” she quips. “I’m at all times like ‘if I don’t learn rapidly another person goes to learn it and take it!” However getting extra candid, Ridley notes, “This movie is about grief and watching somebody who’s so desperately looking for a solution, although she doesn’t know what that reply goes to be. That’s so human and comprehensible,” Ridley says.
To seek out that reply, and her husband, like a lot of the characters within the movie, Ridley’s heroine joins the Physique Retrieval Unit, a company of volunteers (largely with family members lacking on Tasmania) who go door-to-door, and city to city, on the lookout for solutions.
“Lots of people are searching for their very own goodbyes too,” Ridley says. “So it’s very private in a really massive approach, as a result of everybody within the Physique Retrieval Unit has misplaced somebody.
That isn’t to say the zombies don’t matter, as a result of Ridley sees thematic significance to the dwelling lifeless. “The zombies are consultant of Ava. She’s on this second in between. She’s neither right here nor there. Emotionally, she’s attempting to get to the following place… She’s so pushed by disgrace. There may be a lot that she is sorry for and she or he’s searching for absolution in a lot of other ways. So she is attempting to say goodbye to what’s left of her marriage.”
That sense of grief, and the each day indignities of struggling by a disaster, is what grounds the movie’s apocalyptic imagery into one thing human and downbeat. This consists of different vital characters Ava meets alongside the way in which. Characters like Riley (Mark Coles Smith), a army man who discovers Ava on the facet of the highway however will not be essentially a good friend or ally to a civilian.
But for the actors portraying them, it was vital these characters not seem as one thing as reductive as pals or enemies, heroes or villains.
