Bury Me When You're Dead is a 2025 mystery thriller written and directed by Seabold Krebs. The film revolves around Henry (Devon Terrell), who, after failing to keep his wife's dying wish, a series of tragic events leads him to believe she's returned to get revenge.
Seabold Krebs' Bury Me When I'm Dead positions itself as a cross-genre movie promising emotional weight, psychological intrigue, and supernatural terror. Unfortunately, it delivers little more than a familiar, undercooked ghost story with all the ambition but none of the inventiveness required to stand out in today's crowded horror-mystery landscape. The film follows Henry (Devon Terrell), a man whose world begins to collapse after he fails to honor his terminally ill wife Catherine's dying wish: to be buried in a forest near her childhood home. Instead, pressured by the looming threat of her domineering father, Gary (Richard Bekins), Henry returns her body to the city. His guilt compounds due to keeping secrets. The film charts Henry's descent into paranoia and fear as he becomes convinced that Catherine's ghost is haunting him.
Bury Me When I'm Dead adheres to a disappointing and conventional narrative format. Its progression is strictly linear and mirrors countless other supernatural revenge tales. The beats are predictable: betrayal, guilt, spectral return, and a man unravelling under the weight of both personal and metaphysical consequences. What's perhaps most disappointing is the film's lack of visual or sonic imagination. The cinematography and sound design are competent but uninspired, never pushing the aesthetic boundaries of the genres it inhabits. One expects more stylistic flourishes in films that blur the real and the supernatural, but Bury Me When I'm Dead resists any such innovation. Instead, it leans heavily on dialogue and exposition, depriving the audience of moments of real cinematic tension or horror.
The performances are satisfactory—solid but unremarkable. Terrell manages to hold the film together with a quiet intensity, while Hope and Leigh make the most of limited screen time and character development. Bekins, playing the archetypal vengeful father, does what he can with a role that feels underwritten and somewhat implausible. Moreover, the film suffers most in its pacing and development. The supposed haunting—the central hook—takes far too long to arrive. When it does, it feels hurried and underdeveloped, offering neither the psychological unease of great thrillers nor the visceral fear of compelling horror. Catherine's ghostly presence is underused, and the ambiguity around her return is not as fleshed out as it could be.
Ultimately, Bury Me When I'm Dead never fully commits to its themes of guilt, grief, and retribution. Instead, it lingers in a liminal space between genres without truly mastering any. While the idea of a man being haunted by his failures has potential, the film's conventional structure and arguably weak character motivations make for a barely satisfactory experience.
Bury Me When I'm Dead aims high with its genre fusion and emotionally charged premise, but fails to execute either with conviction. A predictable story, uninspired visuals, and underdeveloped supernatural elements render this thriller more forgettable than frightening.
