Thea Hvistendahl – 'Handling the Undead' movie review

Back in 2008, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson released a brilliant film adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s romantic horror novel Let the Right One In, an effort dripping in subversive takes on the vampire genre as per Lindqvist’s own screenplay. Lindqvist has once again returned to his novel work for a film version, this time his book Handling the Undead, with Thea Hvistendahl making her directorial debut.

However, even with Lindqvist on board to help guide Hvistendahl from a narrative perspective, the final result is a film that is undoubtedly beautiful to look at and listen to, and also one that momentarily captivates with an intriguing premise but is ultimately an effort that falls flat by failing to deliver on its storytelling promise.

Featuring a brilliant and admittedly wasted cast of Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie (who collaborate once again following Sick of Myself), Bjorn Sundquist, Bente Borsum and Bahar Pars, Handling the Undead sees a mysterious phenomenon reanimate the recently deceased and set them back upon their loved ones. As is often the case with Lundqvist’s stories, though, the newly raised from the dead aren’t hungry for flesh, unlike so many other zombie movies, but sort of amble around their former loved one’s abodes lifeless-and-yet-alive.

What follows is an interesting examination of the nature of grief. Three families have recently lost their nearest and dearest – a grandfather and mother, their son, a husband and children, their mother, and an elderly woman, her lover. Mourning and grief are essential parts of accepting the loss of someone, but what happens when that process is disrupted by a hollow version of the former self, a version that, for all intents and purposes, looks alive but somehow is not?

There’s a bleak visual overtone to the film that lends itself well to this perpetual state of grief, the always shut curtains, the skies that never seem to clear, symbolic moments of, say, a sprinkler raining against the window in place of actual precipitation. However, dialogue is sparse – understandable for a film about grief – and this leaves us unable to truly understand Hvistendahl and Lindqvist’s protagonists.

The first half is well set up, and the strange phenomenon reintroduces the recently passed away back to their families: a mother reunited with her baby boy, a husband with his wife, and what follows should either be a crumbling down of that newfound relationship, therefore proving the importance of grief itself or some kind of dramatic or even terrifying turn.

But sadly, Hvistendahl delivers neither, and the narrative turns to one of a rather boring nature. There’s a startling lack of tension throughout Handling the Undead that feels like a complete waste of its brilliant cinematography, cast and certainly score – which is undoubtedly the film’s strongest facet – and with the excellent Let the Right One In to always hold the mirror to, Hvistendahl’s feels like a half-fleshed out debut at best.

There are admirable moments of direction and symbolism, but with supposedly shocking moments that are pre-empted a mile before they occur and an ending that leaves little if no impression and certainly no resolution, Handling the Undead comes and goes just as quickly as the dead rise from their graves.

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