Have you ever wished you could talk to a departed loved one again? Handling the Undead, from Norwegian writer-director Thea Hvistendahl, quietly taps a universal sense of grief. Based on a novel by Let the Right One In writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, who co-wrote the Undead script with Hvistendahl, the film is exquisitely composed and makes good use of a talented cast. But for all its artful craft, this zombie resurrection drama is a slow somber road to “never mind.”
The supernatural action is sparked by a mysterious surge at an Oslo power plant, which causes the dead to come to life. We’re not talking a mass event on the level of Night of the Living Dead; the crisis is meted out on a much smaller level, at least initially. The power surge happens while a grieving grandfather named Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist) is visiting his grandson’s freshly dug grave. After passing out during the power surge, Mahler wakes up compelled to dig up the boy and bring him – sort of alive – home to his mother (Renata Reinsve, seen recently in The Worst Person in the World). In another thread, standup comic David (Anders Danielsen Lie, also from Worst Person) gets the news in the middle of a gig that his wife Eva (Bahar Pars) was killed in a car accident; but he becomes hopeful when doctors tell him that she has inexplicably started breathing again. Finally, an elderly woman (Bente Børsum) is shocked when her dead lover (Olga Damani) shows up at their apartment, alive but with signs of decay and “stone cold.”
One problem with Handling the Undead is that you don’t get a full serving of its powerful conceit; with the plot split in three, you only get a third of it. This isn’t one of those complicated narratives where a fragmented throughline becomes resolved in one grand summation. In the space of a slow 97 minutes, the film doesn’t have time to really establish any of these characters and their relationships, and they don’t go anywhere, except back.
Of course, even if we don’t know who these people are (we have no specifics at all about the elderly lesbian couple other than the gentle wisdom of the actresses’ aged faces), we can still recall our own reactions to the death of a loved one, and even if the case of the child is unfamiliar, we know that must be especially devastating. What makes Handling the Undead watchable at all is the actors, and the cinematography by Pål Ulvik Rokseth, who observes characters behind doorways and around walls in a way that visually confirms that we’re eavesdropping on situations that must remain a mystery.
Hvistendahl carefully places her charges in precisely-blocked scenes of acute melancholy…and that’s about it. Inevitably, we learn, with the mourners, that these ashen and clearly stinky figures don’t exactly behave like the people they remember, and the survivors learn that it’s best to leave the dead in their graves. If you’ve seen Re-Animator, you’ve seen a much more thoughtful look at our need to raise the dead, never mind that it operates in a completely different emotional register.
Maybe that’s the more fruitful lesson of Handling the Undead: That art is more than sleepwalking in a zombified fog; real art shakes you out of your slumber.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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