Sundance 2024: Handling The Undead Is The 'Zombie Film' We Need

Handling the Undead inhabits a twilight zone between wish fulfilment and nightmare.

Still from Handling The Undead

This review is part of our critics' round-up of six of the best titles at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

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TO CALL Handling the Undead a zombie movie is a bit of a misnomer. If you are expecting to see hangry, bitey, lumbering corpses vulnerable to headshots and survivors scavenging for supplies once the apocalypse gets underway, this is not that kind of a movie. As the title puts it plainly, the focus here is on how one might cope with the return of the dead. The intention here is to truly grasp what it would mean if the immutable boundary between the living and the dead were not so watertight. The living here are spouses and parents, sons and daughters, all mourning the loss of a loved one. The undead here are a haunting embodiment of their unresolved grief.

The pain of loss can be an all-consuming force. Moving forward from it can feel like sorting through the debris of a life shattered by an apocalyptic event. For the families left behind and coming to terms with the permanence of an absence, the reappearance of loved ones jumbles their five-stage grieving protocol to say the least. As if accepting the finality of loss weren’t already hard enough, this unnatural turn of events renews hope for a spell, before gobbling up what remains of the lives left behind.

In character with the liminal figure of the title, Handling the Undead inhabits a twilight zone between wish fulfilment and nightmare. The season is summer but the grey-lit Scandinavian setting feels pricked by shivering disquiet and shrouded in acute melancholy. The story is mournful but moving, staged with a sure hand by Norwegian director Thea Hvistendahl. The source is the novel of the same name by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist. Co-written by Hvistendahl with Lindqvist himself, the screenplay maintains the charged spareness and sharp precision of the novel’s prose.

Just as Let the Right One In (Lindqvist’s 2004 book and the 2008 adaptation) recoded the vampire story into a bleak but affecting one, Handling the Undead does likewise for the zombie story. Blood and guts are booted into the trunk so that emotional turmoil can do the driving. Dread accrues at a stately pace with unnerving silences and undeathly sounds: the thump from a coffin buried six feet deep, the rasp of laboured breaths, and the buzz of flies hovering around a decomposing body. Rounding off this creeping feeling of doom to the very end is a plaintive score by Peter Raeburn.

In an Oslo high-rise residential complex, the elderly Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist) trudges up the stairs to the home of his daughter Anna (Renate Reinsve), who is painting her toenails and listening to a bossa nova record. There are no words exchanged. No glances shared. No acknowledgement of each other. The presence of toys and the empty bedroom of a child betoken their loss, the weight of which has created a distance between the two. Grief appears to have paralysed both, like zombies programmed to somehow keep going on in misery. The hushed stillness of Sundquist’s defeated posture and the funereal pallor on Reinsve’s face suggest nothing short of the dead returning, if not time healing, can make them whole again.

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Elsewhere in the city, the widowed Tora (Bente Børsum) bids goodbye to her partner Elisabet (Olga Damani) one last time — or so she presumes — at a funeral. On returning to an empty home, now a mausoleum of mere memories, she hangs up on a possible condolence call. Less sombre is the home of stand-up comedian David (Anders Danielsen Lie), his partner Eva (Bahar Pars), and their two children Flora (Dauksta) and Kian (Hansen). With Kian’s birthday on the horizon, David and Eva discuss presents before going their separate ways. Soon after, a car accident claims Eva’s life.

The accident occurs when Eva starts to hear strange noises on the car radio — the first harbinger of the barrier separating the living and the dead turning porous. A high-pitched frequency echoes citywide; power goes out; car alarms clamour; birds flock in a tizzy; people get headaches and pass out. When they wake up, they are forced to face a reality where the dead walk the Earth. If this were a typical zombie movie, the narrative emphasis may have been on the urban panic, the supermarket looting, the weapons hoarding, the media circuses and militias and cults forming. Handling the Undead stands out of the horde by limiting the perspective to how three grieving families respond to such an inexplicable phenomenon.

Each of them responds differently. Mahler digs up his grandson’s rotting but breathing body, carries him home, bathes him, dresses him and tucks him into bed with dazed acceptance. When Anna comes home from work to find her son in bed, her first instinct is denial. Anguished and unsure if he is real or a ghost of grief, she takes a desperate measure before she is stopped by her father, following which she embraces her son’s reappearance for the miracle it is, hiding him away in a remote cabin to keep him safe.

When an undead Elisabet walks home in her burial dress, Tora does not question it, welcoming her with open arms, giving her a bath, doing her make-up, and dancing to Nina Simone’s tender rendition of “Ne Me Quitte Pas”. The reunion is so gentle and moving it even makes the undead Elisabeth tear up. Eva’s resurrection confuses David just as it does the doctors. But he comes to accept it just as his two kids do. Until the film creeps towards a particularly “hare-raising” sequence. Our paranoia about the return of the dead ending in violence is confirmed. But Hvistendahl lets the inevitable play out only to spin a warning about the perils of sustained dissociation. To cope with grief, the film reminds us, is not to forget but to learn to let go.

Handling the Undead had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2024 as part of its World Cinema Dramatic section.

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