'Handling the Undead' Unearths Profound Sadness in Unique and Somber Zombie Tale [Review]

​When our loved ones die, their life ends but a new one is just beginning for us. One that feels quieter. Darker. Emptier. We all grieve differently, yet death is the same for everyone. It takes something from us, giving back only sadness in return. A wound that grows smaller over time but never fully heals, no matter how many attempts we make at stitching it closed. Norwegian director Thea Hvistendahl’s affecting zombie film, Handling the Undead, unearths those difficult feelings in a unique tale filled with such palpable grief that it could make the dead stir.
 
Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In) and adapted for the screen by Lindqvist and Hvistendahl, Handling the Undead introduces us to a trio of households who have recently lost someone. Their lives turned upside down, they spend their days in quiet apathy, barely alive themselves. Until one day, the dead begin to return from the grave, not as flesh-hungry monsters but distant husks of who they were before. The families see the strange miracle as a way to get back what they’ve lost, eventually forced to face the hard truth that death does not return what it has taken in the same condition it found it.
 
From the moment it opens on Peter Raeburn’s somber score over darkness, Handling the Undead feels like a funeral procession. We meet Mahler (Bjorn Sundquist) and his daughter, Anna (Renate Reinsve), a mother whose little boy died not long ago. David (Anders Danielsen Lie), struggling to cope with taking care of his two kids after his wife is killed in a car accident. And Tora (Bente Borsum), an old woman trapped in misery after the loss of her lifelong partner. For the first eight minutes or so, not a word of dialogue is spoken. The city these people live in resembles how the world has grown still for each of them, grey and eerily quiet. Deep blacks fill the screen, whether as the shadows of their homes, the clothes they wear or the cars they drive. Not a moment goes by where Hvistendahl doesn’t instill some sort of visual reminder that these characters exist in a world weary from loss, emphasized by devastating performances. All the way until the final seconds, the audience takes on the task of pallbearer as we carry a casket and observe the sorrow of family and friends.

As for the zombies, excellent makeup effects may make some of them look like the nightmarish ghouls of a Lucio Fulci film, but Hvistendahl’s take on the undead couldn’t be further from your average flesh-muncher. Following a mysterious electrical disturbance that comes like an ominous disruptor of the hushed setting, the loved ones of our protagonists are returned to them. They do not speak. They barely move. And most importantly, their first instinct isn’t to bite into every living thing they see. Instead, they’re like patients nearing the end. They wheeze. They gaze with inexpressive eyes. They do almost nothing but provide the characters with more time in their presence. Handling the Undead doesn’t treat its zombies like monsters, but like manifestations of grief made whole. Eyes milky and skin rotten, they’re horrific to witness, embodying the ugliness of death. At the same time, Hvistendahl and Lindqvist encourage the audience to feel empathy for their ghouls. Like the family members they left behind, they aren’t truly living. They’re trapped in the misery of death the same as the human characters, in the kind of film where zombies cry and you want to cry with them.
 
You might think Handling the Undead sounds like a rough watch, and it can be—I should warn you, the film features a gut-wrenching scene of animal violence—but Hvistendahl’s intent isn’t just in making the viewer uncomfortable. No, for while the moody tale in a sense becomes one long funeral attended by the characters, it acts the same for any of us who may still be grieving a loved one. Yes, the sadness of the film is profound. Yes, the aching of it pulsates off the screen like a throbbing bruise. But the filmmaker is also gentle in the way she guides the audience through this sad story. Watching Hvistendahl’s film is like sitting in that graveyard and seeing whoever you lost be lowered into the dirt, only to have the reassuring hand of a close friend take your own. That hand wants the viewer to know that it understands the painful finality of death, that there is no return from that plane, and that that’s okay. It wants us to walk away knowing the difference between living and not, and that the best way to celebrate someone we’ve lost is to go on living while carrying their memory with us. To let ourselves exist only in the past, well, that’s no way to live.
 
Profound, painful, and deeply personal, Handling the Undead is perhaps the most moving zombie film you’ll ever see. A complete one-eighty from the usual flesh-eating feast, it’s like those quietest and thought-provoking moments from Romero’s Dead films, stretched out into a grief-stricken feature that holds the audience’s hand through the acceptance of death. Not only does Hvistendahl establish herself as an exciting voice to watch in the horror space…she unearths a hypnotic zombie film unlike most, accomplishing for the undead what Lindqvist did for vampires with Let the Right One In by pumping sorrow and longing into classic monsters anxious to be explored outside the confines of the coffins they were buried in.

Handling the Undead rises in limited theaters June 7th from Neon. 

By Matt Konopka