Handling the Undead – A Minimalist Horror Drama (Early Review)

The theme of grief, something most have experience at some point in their lives, arguably lends perfectly to the zombie genre as both inherently deal with death and loss. When it comes to Handling the Undead, if the title didn’t already give it away, found itself stuck between a grief movie and a zombie movie, seemingly indecisive of which one it wanted to be. Meanwhile, a slower pace and underdeveloped characters inspire even less confidence. While the pieces are certainly there, including the look and haunting atmosphere, the film does next to nothing with what was a great premise at least on paper which essentially renders everything else moot. Running at just over the 90+ minute mark, in spite of its lack of focus, what ultimately carries it is the Worst Person in the World reunion of Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, who deliver great performances (though not in scenes together). One can’t help but just want the film to be centered around them, however, no one truly got the chance to ever get off the ground in this overstuffed story, assuming anyone bothers to stay with it long enough.

Handling the Undead is a horror drama, based on the 2005 book of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist (a co-writer of the film), that focuses on a group of families whose lives are suddenly turned upside down once their deceased loved ones somehow came back to them. The circumstances as to how that happened were (and continue to be) a mystery but that’s not the point. The real point is how each family adjusted to having their loved ones back. Are their returned loved ones really their loved ones? What did they want? Be it a family who were grieving their mother following a car accident, an elderly woman who buried the love of her life, only to see her later that same day, or a depressed single mother reunited with her child rescued by her caring grandfather. Starting off by doing next to nothing to develop the connection between the families and their respective loved ones, the story merely dragged its feet as they comically ignored the signs that were clearly indicating what they became while trying to make it work with them. Inevitably, something had to give with these relationships as these warped fantasies had to come to an end once reality began to set in.

A short running time along with pacing issues only made it more difficult to connect with the story and characters, jumping between Anna (Reinsve) and her father Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist), a stand-up comedian named Daniel (Lie) thrust into the position of having to keep his family together in the midst of uncertainty about the condition of his wife Eva (Pars), and Tora (Bente Børsum) and her girlfriend Elisabet (Olga Damani), is too much. None of the storylines are allowed to gain any momentum as they keep getting cut off by the next storyline, further exposing their thinness. Slow moving, using minimal dialog along with beautiful imagery and a haunting score to get things going, the film starts to get somewhat near the end as the story started to take things seriously. That being said, there is still so much more material left on the table. The returned loved ones in this story merely scratch the surface in terms of the zombie apocalypse angle as the film’s focus leaned more on its characters’ grief but they didn’t even help at that. A shell of their former selves and unable to communicate, they were barely enough of a conduit to facilitate anything. 

In the end, the best part of Handling the Undead is the combination of Reinsve and Lie as Anna and Daniel. Though they don’t work as a combination in the film, they each delivered great performances while elevating the material than what was on the page. Both are, once again, so compelling to watch despite the material not being there. It’s just a shame that had their characters been more developed, the film could have been so much more. 

Overall, Handling the Undead takes an interesting premise and does next to nothing with it, squandering decent performances and strong technical work in a film that could have been so much more.

still courtesy of Elevation Pictures

If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.

Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.