Director Thea Hvistendahl isn’t interested in making the kind of zombie apocalypse film that we’ve become accustomed to seeing; here, gore and blood are replaced with emptiness and longing. Intense and sporadic music cues are only reserved for a few key tense moments. And most of all, the complete horror of a fully decayed body coming to kill us becomes the lingering hope that somebody we love is still in there–somewhere behind lifeless eyes.

Based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s (known for Let the Right One In) 2005 novel, NEON’s Handling the Undead follows three families in Oslo, all grappling with the death of loved ones. After an unexpected and unexplained supernatural phenomenon, decayed family members begin coming back to life as zombies. These families must confront what it means to reunite with their loved ones and whether these two worlds can truly co-exist.

On paper, it’s a fascinating, fresh take on the zombie story with an understated approach that draws in an eerie and unsettling atmosphere. Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s isolating and intricate camerawork often places the characters to the far right, left or back of the frame, creating an intentional and effective disconnect. Even in the opening set-up, before the zombies come to life, every frame is filled with dread.

But simply creating this tone isn’t enough to make this adaptation quite work. With thinly veiled, uninteresting characters and severe pacing issues that make the film feel significantly longer than 98 minutes, Handling the Undead never goes deep enough. A slow-burn horror drama that defies the expectations and conventions of its genre is always welcome. In this case, though, it doesn’t allow us to go beyond a surface-level depiction of grief manifested in the dead roaming the earth.

Hvistendahl’s first time tackling a horror feature marks the third time that actors Renata Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie have worked together — a welcome and always exciting collaboration for fans of Norwegian cinema. However, the two never share the screen as the three families depicted in the film all lead completely separate lives dealing with similar questions about their dead families. While this multi-plot approach has potential, the story never explores the characters enough to make it pay off.

Like all of the actors in this film, the immense talents of Reinsve and Danielsen Lie are wasted here. All of the characters feel incredibly one-note, making it difficult to see any dimension or reason why we are following these specific characters struggling with death. Hvistendahl’s script clearly tries to depict characters so overwhelmed with grief and loneliness that they lose their sense of self. The issue, then, is that the contrast between the different families is never strong enough to understand how everybody deals with grief differently. We never understand how these different storylines complement each other beyond simply exploring the same themes in the same way.

The film’s strengths are found on a technical level. The sound design is particularly eerie — well accompanied by Peter Raeburn’s ominous score that deservedly won a prize at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. There is no shortage of captivating imagery and moments: Anna (Reinsve) holding her child in a boat and a violent moment at a hospital involving an animal, just to name a few. But this visual imagery only goes so far without strong characters to go alongside them.

Handling the Undead so desperately wants to dig deep, to go beyond the grave and explore what life might really be like if the dead began to slowly crawl back into our beds. But with no clear sense of pacing or idea about what the story is really trying to say beyond the film’s admirable artistic exterior, this unique concept is thwarted.

Review Courtesy of Matt Minton

Feature Image Credit to NEON via IMDb