Since its modern conception with Night of the Living Dead (United States, 1968), zombie cinema has been fertile ground for a wide variety of allegories, many of them socially oriented, like critiques of consumerism and economic inequality. This is why Handling the Undead (Norway, 2024) is an extremely unusual specimen within this horror subgenre.
So much so that one might even question whether it counts as horror cinema. It does, though director and co-writer Thea Hvistendahl is more interested in the characters’ inner drama. It’s a film about a different kind of zombie apocalypse: not the one that brings the typical catastrophic collapse of civilization, but the collapse of the lives that continue when their loved ones have already left them.
What’s It About?
In Oslo, Anna (Renate Reinsve, from The Worst Person in the World) is a young single mother who can’t overcome her son’s recent death, and her father (Bjørn Sundquist) doesn’t know how to help her. David (Anders Danielsen Lie), an aspiring comedian, deeply loves his wife, Eva (Bahar Pars), who dies suddenly in a traffic accident. Tora (Bente Børsum) is the last to leave the funeral of her beloved partner, Elisabet (Olga Damani), and returns to live alone in a house with her memories.
After a mysterious blackout, these dead return to life. With the city surrounded by the mystery of these resurrections, the families must deal with the sudden return of their loved ones—and with the possibility that these people, and they themselves, might not be the same people they were before—.
Handling the Undead Isn’t Your Typical Zombie Movie
If you hadn’t already guessed at this point, Handling the Undead is far from the abject, sensational terror we usually expect from zombie cinema: if this were a spectrum, Hvistendahl’s film would be at the opposite end from something like World War Z (USA, 2013).
The film, with its script adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel of the same name (as he previously did with the similar Border and with Let the Right One In, the latter about vampires), completely omits the shocking images of violence and the expected chases of the subgenre. The emotions, therefore, are very restrained, darker in a discreet way.
It’s a zombie movie that would hardly qualify as such if not for the presence of the living dead. Blood and cannibalism are kept to a minimum. The struggle for survival isn’t even, in fact, the main issue here. Or at least not the type of survival expected from this kind of movie, where protagonists must carry weapons, search for supplies, and hide to avoid being devoured.
This is because Hvistendahl’s and Lindqvist’s interest lies elsewhere: in how these characters survive after tragedy. Along with the deliberate pacing of the editing, the cinematography by Pål Ulvik Rokseth (22 July), with muted blue tones that evoke the sadness of a cold Scandinavian north, observes the stillness, the empty spaces, and places us in the mental space of tragedy, mourning, and melancholy of its three protagonists. They have experienced great losses—some more recently than others—navigating different stages between shock, denial, and depression.
It should be said that, if Handling the Undead reclaims anything from zombie tradition, it’s its lack of concern with explaining the causes of the dead’s resurrection or outlining detailed backstories for its characters. We never learn how Anna’s son died, or whether Tora and Elisabet had been together for a long time (though it’s suggested they were together for a lifetime). They’re also not made more complex within this scenario, nor is there a dense reflection on what it would mean for the dead to return from the other side, whether they would be the same people as before or not.
The above might feel dramatically thin, though the film certainly has something to say. The narrative is more oriented toward providing an allegory about how to move forward when the past refuses to die. These zombies don’t provide the spectacle of cannibalistic violence, but are more like ghosts or memories we cling to.
But is what revives in memory the same as it was in life? And more importantly: what’s the tragedy of not letting go?
Handling the Undead is now available to stream on Hulu and other platforms.
