Sundance 2024 Review: HANDLING THE UNDEAD, Norwegian Art-Horror, Different Kind of Zombie

A grandfather quietly grieves over the fresh, newly dug grave of his preteen grandson. An elderly woman quietly mourns the passage of her life partner. A husband sits at the hospital bedside of the body of his wife.

Separated by time and distance, each character, in their turn, faces a heart-shattering, soul-crushing, life-altering change for the worse in Norway’s capital city, Oslo, leaving their lives, individually and collectively, irrevocably devoid of purpose or meaning in Thea Hvistendahl’s deceptively quiet, stunningly brilliant adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s (Let the Right One In) novel of the same name, Handling the Undead (Håndtering av udød).

With influences ranging from George A. Romero’s original Dead trilogy, Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, to the more recent French series, The Returned, and its quickly forgotten American remake, Handling the Undead finds its center not in the usual tropes and conventions of zombie films — specifically a plague that inevitably leads to an apocalyptic reordering of the natural and unnatural world — but in the first days of an outbreak, when the reanimation of the recently dead doesn’t portend the end times or 21st-century civilization in its myriad iterations.

Instead, the re-arrival of the recently dead into the lives of the grief-stricken offers them, however temporarily, a brief, impossible reprieve from the existential anguish that’s made them, like the mute, vacant-eyed dead, less than whole, emotionally, spiritually, and metaphysically. Stylistically apposite to English-language zombie entries, Handling the Undead eerily unfolds at a deliberately languid, leisurely pace, following the central characters, including the grandfather’s daughter and the husband’s two children, one a rebellious teen eager to leave the suffocating strictures of her family life behind, the other her placid younger brother, eagerly awaiting his next birthday.

Through carefully calibrated observation, Handling the Undead locates each character in moments of extreme duress and despondency. For the initially unnamed grandfather, his inability to reconcile himself to the loss of his grandson leads him to the latter’s graveside.

In a narrative move likely to prove divisive among moviegoers, Handling the Undead doesn’t offer a specific explanation, scientific or otherwise, for the return of the undead to the world of the living except metaphorically in the overwhelming, world-filling grief that unites the disparate, loss-stricken characters. Only an unexpected power surge that leaves Oslo briefly in darkness offers the barest hint of a connection or explanation.

When the grandfather, Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist), places his ear near the freshly dug grave, he repeatedly hears tapping from the coffin. He does what any grieving grandfather would do: digs up his wheezing, decomposing son, and brings him to the home he shares with his daughter, Anna (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World).

She doesn’t respond with her father’s desperate, hopeful optimism, but with shock, surprise, and something else altogether, utter and complete despair. But even for Anna, optimism, however ill-founded, overcomes whatever doubts or questions she might have about her son’s unexpected return.

Taking a generously elliptical, interstitial approach, Handling the Undead allows the audience safely hiding on the other side of the screen to sit quietly with the characters and their daily, unexceptional lives, following the elderly woman home to an empty, hollow home; the soon-too-expire wife, Eva (Bahar Pars), and mother as she attempts to connect with her sullen, rebellious daughter; the husband and father, David (Anders Danielson Lie), polishing a stand-up routine at a  local comedy club; and Anna as she departs the stifling, suffocating home she shares with her father, Mahler.

All are moments that feel mundane and ordinary (because they are, in fact, both), before the inevitable return of the undead and the emotional, physical, and spiritual complications that follow. Leaving the reason or cause for the return of the undead unanswered to focus exclusively on a handful of survivors — in one or both senses of the word — Handling the Undead adds a more than worthwhile contribution to an otherwise moribund sub-genre.

Handling the Undead premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. A theatrical release will follow later this year.