Handling the Undead
As dusk descends on a summer day in Oslo, murmurations, flickering traffic lights and a massive power failure signal something strange has happened. Three different families dealing with unbearable loss have different reactions when they are suddenly faced with “Handling the Undead.”
Laura's Review: B
Director Thea Hvistendahl makes her feature directorial debut with a joint screenplay adaptation with John Ajvide Lindqvist, the novel’s author ("Let the Right One In"), and a highly stylized production, its designer Linda Janson ("We Are the Best!") and cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth ("22 July") utilizing gradients of one or two colors within starkly composed shots. The film also features “The Worst Person in the World” stars Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie as Anna, a woman deeply depressed over the loss of her young son and David, a man who only briefly loses his wife to a car accident.
As a melancholy choral plays on the soundtrack (music by “Under the Skin’s” Peter Raeburn) we see an old man in black eating, then packing away yet another plateful of food in a refrigerator. ‘I’ll eat at work,’ his daughter Anna tells him, leaving the apartment where a child clearly once lived. Later, while visiting the grave of his grandson Elias (a rather obvious animatronic), Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist, "Dead Snow") hears rapping from beneath the ground and goes to the rescue, hoping to relieve both his own grief as well as his increasingly distant daughter’s.
In another home, teenaged Flora (Inesa Dauksta) is introduced playing a zombie video game and complaining about having to babysit younger brother Kian (Kian Hansen) as her mom, Eva (Bahar Pars, "A Man Called Ove") heads out to buy him a birthday gift and her dad, David, leaves to perform a stand-up act. He’ll receive a devastating phone call, but as he sits on the floor besides his wife’s corpse, she seems to come to life. Her doctors are flummoxed.
A senior, Tora (Bente Børsum), has just returned from mourning the death of her wife when Elisabet (Olga Damani), oddly inexpressive, walks into their apartment and sits down on a kitchen chair.
Lindqvist’s work isn’t so much a horror tale, although the genre gradually does creep in, as an exploration of the myriad ways in which humans process grief, each of the three families having different reactions, not only to their loss, but to having their loved ones return to them. Hvistendahl takes the slow cinema approach here, using little dialogue and long takes. Subtle foreshadowing finds Anna caught in a food prep kitchen during the blackout having to dispose of rotting meat. Later, fearing authorities who come to her door, presumably over Elias’s unauthorized disinterment, she and Mahler flee to a rural cabin, welcomed by a bowl of rotting apples. Notably, Anna opens windows wherever Elias lays, the sound of flies always accompanying his presence.
The production’s use of color is muted but striking, from the gray/green of Elias’s visage repeated in an overall scene to the beautiful ombre effect of brownish salmons escalating into muted maroons in a mise en scene featuring Tora and Elisabet, the former leading the latter in dance to ‘If You Go Away.’
Viewers should be warned that there are scenes of suicide and suicide attempts and one horrific scene featuring an animal. But on the whole, “Handling the Undead” treats its subject matter with quiet restraint.
Robin's Review: B-
Three families are in remorse and grief when each loses a beloved member. Then, something strange happens and their deceased come back to “life,” But, they are not the same as when they left this mortal coil and those remaining are now left to “Handling the Undead.”
Death is not an easy thing for the survivors of the loss of a loved one. Here, we have a Norwegian look at death and “life” regenerated. I would not call this a “zombie movie,” though, even if it is about the dead being reanimated.
In this Nordic tale, each of the three families depicted lose someone near and dear. An elderly woman loses her lifelong companion, a family loses their mom and an elderly man loses his grandson. They all accept their death to different degrees but all are stunned when their deceased love ones return to the living – of sorts.
One story that occurred to me is the old one about the Monkey’s Paw. In that yarn, the titular paw (think like a rabbit’s foot), gives the holder three wishes and, in that story, one wish the holder makes is for the return of a recently deceased loved one. What you get is not what you hoped for. Here, the returned are but a shell of their once-living selves.
I think American audiences would find this lyrical tale of loss and grief a slow slog and boring, Familiarity with the Nordic people and culture is a must to appreciate this examination of those left behind after a loved one’s death.
I understand how impactful the loss of a family member, whether human or animal, or a close friend can be. I have been there and felt that grief, but you cannot bring them back, except through memory and maybe that is enough.
Neon releases "Handling the Undead" in select theaters on 5/31/24, expanding on 6/7/24.
