HANDLING THE UNDEAD
by Eric Lindbom
Three out of Five Snakes
Flesh eating zombies keep out running (actually lurching) George Romero’s original cycle and all its remakes. Menu options are vast. To mangle and misquote Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, would you like them on a plane (FLIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD) in a train (TRAIN TO BUSAN) as a joke (SHAUN OF THE DEAD), as a consumerism poke (Romero’s original DAWN OR THE DEAD), a nausea challenge (ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST), a TV franchise (THE WALKING DEAD) or a meet cute (WARM BODIES)?
Norwegian director Thea Hvistendahl takes this malleable monster to unexpected dramatic and humanistic ends with HANDLING THE UNDEAD (Theatrical and for rent on Apple TV, Amazon Video and other outlets).
On the same sweltering evening, three families in Oslo experience their recently departed loved ones inexplicably returning to life. The undead here aren’t aggressive.but passive ciphers. These dead-eyed mannequins appear ambivalent if not sorrowful about a resurrection they never sought.
Their confused but thrilled family members eagerly drag them back home with the ill-advised instincts of a pet lover taking in a feral animal foaming at the mouth. The mute undead can’t explain themselves and their survivors are afraid to seek answers lest the authorities intervene.
Instead, the characters try instilling a familiar normalcy. A mother (a stunning Renate Reinsve) and her father take their undead young son/grandson on a picnic. A middle-aged lesbian (Bente Borsum) strips her zombie lover and dresses her up and even applies make up. Lastly, a standup comic father (Anders Danielsen Lie from the art-house wonder THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD) visits his wife in the hospital after she wakes in a vacant state from a fatal car accident; the distraught father tries to get his dead alive wife to connect with her kids.
HANDLING THE UNDEAD is based on a best-selling 2005 novel by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist and, like his Nordic vampire crossover hit LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (which he wrote and produced), it explores well-meaning characters who enable dark forces to meet their own emotional needs. In this case, the theme is grieving and co-writer Hvistendahl shows desperate but likable characters who can’t let go.
Hvistendahl has a sharp visual eye and luxuriates in dimly lit, shadowy hallways and homes. The lighting especially entrances when the grandfather’s car headlights envelope him while he digs his grandson out from his grave. A clammy foreboding oozes throughout minus any jump scares. Violence is at an absolute minimum until the final reels. That said, PETA-lovers may find one scene extremely rough.
Embraced on the festival circuit (at Sundance and elsewhere) HANDLING THE UNDEAD may strike some gorehounds not as a true horror film but an art house fantasy decked out in spooky night clothes. Some may lose patience or even emerge as depressed as the moviegoer stranger who described the experience as ‘bleak.” That’s an accurate description however one feels about this demanding but bracingly moving feature with a lingering after taste.
Eric Lindbom is a hardcore horror buff with a strong stomach, weaned on the Universal classics from the ’30s and ’40s. He’s written film and/or music reviews for City Pages, Twin Cities Reader, LA WEEKLY, Request magazine and Netflix. He co-edits triggerwarningshortfiction.com, a site specializing in horror, fantasy and crime short stories with illustrations by co-editor John Skewes. He lives in Los Angeles.
