Handling the Undead (now streaming on Hulu) might be the arthousiest arthouse horror film yet, a zombie film unlike any zombie film before it. If one had written off the zombie genre after the market was saturated with decaying flesh and brain-eating in the 2000s and 2010s (raises hand emphatically), one might find something freshly rotten to sink one’s teeth into via this dark tale. It’s based on a novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote trolls-living-among-humans story Border and neo-vampire saga Let the Right One In, both of which became memorable films (the latter being an undeniable classic). The debut feature from Norwegian director Thea Hvistendahl, Handling the Undead foregoes many zombie-flick tropes, subverting the formula for a glacially paced meditation on grief that just so happens to be populated with a few shambling corpses.
The Gist: These people are in mourning. Mahler (Bjorn Sundquist) weeps on his couch before he visits his daughter Anna (Renata Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World), who’s in a deep depression after the death of her young son. The boy’s toys are still scattered sadly around the apartment. Elsewhere, Tora (Bente Borsum) says goodbye to her lover Elizabet (Olga Damani), draping a lace handkerchief over Elizabet’s face as she lies in her coffin. The undertaker wheels the body away and Tora returns to a home that now feels very, very empty. And now we meet Eva (Bahar Pars), mother of Kian (Kian Hansen) and Flora (Inesa Dauksta), and husband to David (Anders Danielsen Lie). David finishes his standup comedy set and fields a phone call – it’s the hospital. Eva is there. It seems there was an accident. He sits in the room with her body, distraught, and all we can do is ache for this family in the inevitable moment when he tells his kids their mother is dead.
But David won’t have to do that. No, he’ll have to tell them something far more upsetting: Eva’s heart inexplicably started beating again. It may have something to do with the strange power surge that scrambles the car radio, flickers the lights and plunges the area into temporary darkness. Eva’s eyes are mottled, her flesh pallid. But she’s alive – technically. One night, Tora awakens to find Elizabet has come home; she, too, is there but not quite all there – mute, thousand-yard stare, seemingly very little brain activity. Stricken with sadness, Mahler lies atop his grandson’s grave and hears thumping. He points the car headlights at the plot and gets out a shovel, driven by – what, exactly? Morbid hope? Curiosity? Grief has rendered all these characters irrational, tempted by the opportunity to see their loved ones again. But I’ll be damned if this doesn’t feel like a deal with the devil.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Any excuse to rewatch Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is a good excuse (same goes for Matt Reeves’ underrated American remake, Let Me In). Handling the Undead also recalls some of the horror-in-a-realist-context vibes of David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, and it’s more Apichatpong Weerasethakul than George Romero.
Performance Worth Watching: In limited screen time, Reinsvie delivers a poignant portrait of anger, desperation and anguish. (And any excuse to rewatch The Worst Person in the World is a good excuse.)
Memorable Dialogue: “Grandpa is coming,” Mahler says as he digs. “Grandpa is coming.”
Sex and Skin: Zombie nudity. Perhaps it goes without saying that it’s not particularly sexy.
Our Take: Handling the Undead is a slow-cinema domestic-drama riff on a genre that’s almost always about blood and guts, violent action and apocalyptic macro-metaphors. This story is decidedly micro, an introspective what-if scenario that’s more about broken people desperately trying to fill the empty spaces in their lives, and settling for terrifying facsimiles of the loved ones they lost. They’re very much in the bargaining stage of grief. Speaking of which, it seems we’re in the midst of a grief-and-loss cinematic pandemic, when the prospect of watching yet another downtempo brooder is wearisome. Yes – death weighs heavy. Dozens upon dozens of movies have recently reiterated this point. We get it.
But a subtly weird and contemplative deconstruction of the traditional zombie film? That’s a far more welcome prospect. Lindqvist and Hvistendahl wrote a minimalist script featuring little dialogue, allowing the director to cultivate suffocating atmospherics with long, ruminative takes and a color palette that’s as gray and miserable as the skin of the undead. She balances wide, patient establishing shots with closeups in cramped interiors, and eschews gore for more subtly disturbing imagery that makes a ridiculous scenario feel all too real. At this point in an exhausted genre, a long, wide shot of a single undead man wandering through a wooded locale is far more terrifying than a snarling, brain-eating horde.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Traditional horror fans, you’ve been warned – Handling the Undead won’t deliver the shocks and dyed-red corn syrup you may expect. But for an art film with more on its mind than gruesome slaughter, it delivers.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.