Norway/Sweden/Greece | 2024 | Directed by Thea Hvistendahl
Logline: The recently deceased suddenly are reawakened and several families struggle to cope with their loved ones back from the dead.
It’s taken the better part of twenty years for a cinema adaption of John Ajvide Linqvist’s follow-up novel to his brilliant Let the Right One In, which was superbly adapted for the screen by Tomas Alfredson in 2008. Shifting from one undead to another – vampires to zombies – Linqvist opted for an even more sombre and unique take on classic horror fare. Handling the Undead’s main narrative thrust deals with the deep emotional and psychological ramifications that besiege those having to accommodate their own immediate family members who have become the “re-living”.
It is a hot summer’s day in Oslo. Elderly Tora (Bente Børsum) has just attended the open-casket funeral of her dearly beloved partner Elisabet (Olga Damani). Anna (Renate Reinsve) is suffering from a deep depression, she ignores her elderly father Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist), who then visits the recent grave of his young grandson. David (Anders Danielsen Lie), a father of teenage daugher and young son, says goodbye to his wife, Eva (Bahar Pars), who drives to work, but suffers a deadly crash.
There is a massive city-wide electrical interference. A cosmic disturbance has occurred. The energy surge causes those who have very recently died to be re-animated. Elisabet returns home to her lavish house. Mahler can hear his grandson’s muffled knocking from within his coffin, and he quickly digs him out and heads to his daughter’s apartment. David is at his wife’s hospital bedside, resigned to mourning her death, but she begins to move.
Now these families must juggle grief with joy, as they try and understand the grave situation. Their loved ones have returned, but they are not who they used to be. They are in stupors, unable to communicate with words. They are alive, but they are dead. But the worst is yet to come.
A deeply contemplative, disquieting film that resonates long after the final chilling scene. While it doesn’t capture the same complex emotional depth as the novel, and simplifies many of the relationship elements, it does offer a beautifully filmed treatise on the immediate “horror” of the predicament. The immediacy and delicacy of the situation is what works best, and although there is slow burn to the narrative, the end arrives much sooner than you anticipate. In a way, the film feels like a pilot episode to a Netflix Original Series, an alternate perspective and tone to The Walking Dead, and one I would definitely have kept watching.
The performances of the entire cast are superb, and the cinematography and lingering, drifting camerawork is terrific. However, I’m convinced they used an animatronic puppet for the undead boy, yet there is an actor credited in the role. Hmmm. It wasn’t convincing.
For those keen for the usual gory zombie carnage, Handling the Undead is not the undead you’re looking for. Nor is this a Satanist horror movie as the poster art suggests. This is a darkly poetic, dramatic study of grief that curls into deeper tragedy in the last quarter of the movie, becoming a macabre statement of personal loss. Don’t compare to the novel, savour this cinematic twilight as a darkness of its own. It’s one of the year’s best.