In the sweltering Oslo summer heat, something strange is happening.  As the residents escape the heat, the dead escape their crypts.  A lost love (Olga Damani).  A perished mother (Bahar Pars). A still be-mourned grandchild (Dennis Østry Ruud).  They all return to their family’s bewilderment, but sometimes it is best to let the dead rest so that the living may heal. 

Thea Hvistendahl directs Handling the Undead, a dramatic horror film she co-wrote with John Ajvide Lindqvist who, in turn, was adapting his own 2005 novel of the same name.  After languishing in development for years, the film finally bowed at the 2024 edition of the Sundance Film Festival and the Göteberg Film Festival in its home country under its native title, Håndtering av udøde. Peter Raeburn’s score won in Park City and the film was nominated for the Dragon Award as the best Nordic Film back in Sweden.  General audiences would have to wait, though, as the 97-minute film received a punishingly limited theatrical release, but was made most widely available on Hulu as part of the streamer’s ongoing output deal with Neon. 

The film is a kaleidoscope that follows three families as they, well, “handle the undead” returning to their lives.  It is very much a drama dressed in genre; a rumination about the pain of grief against the fleeting nature of time.  With this in mind, it makes sense that the film struggled to find its commercial audience as it did not have enough horror for the horror heads and leaned too far into genre for the elitists, but that off-the-cuff judgment is not fair to the film.  Horror, especially indie horror, has often been used as an inroad to explore the fears that haunt the darker corners of the human condition as seen in the rise of this genre being commandeered by budding filmmakers using the medium as a substitute for therapy that turns grief into a monster.  Here, Hvistendahl turns the grief into the form of a lost loved one in a not quite lyrical but much more tranquil and poetic way than Stephen King’s characters experience in Pet Sematary. 

She accomplishes this through a mastery of tone across the film, no doubt influencing Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s choices behind the camera as well as Thomas Grotmol and Trude Lirhus’ work in the edit.  After opening to a church chorus as Rokseth stalks a formally warm with love but now cavernous and cold home, it quickly becomes a very silent film, shooting the city at a distance that we only hear the finest buzz of life and Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist) from a high aerial shot as if looking down from heaven, but no angels will be found from our perch in the clouds.  As noise begins to enter the film, it takes on an equally eerie atmosphere.  The dog barking. The radio signal is scrambled.  Later, an old man walks in the night, covered only by his nightgown and bathed in the throw from a street lamp. There have been moments of dialogue and we begin to build connections between these characters, but there is a strange lack of names across the narrative, and especially in this first act, reflective of the tragic fact that we are all one in grief.  Death comes for us all, first the ones who we hold dear, and finally, then, for us, when it is our turn to leave those we love behind. 

The scent of death lingers across the film.  The apples are rotten and the peonies will not bloom.  This feeling of decay permeates so much that when Kian (Kian Hansen) is celebrating his birthday with his father (Anders Danielsen Lie) and sister (Inesa Dauksta) while his mother is in the hospital after a car crash, this celebration of life, signified by a new rabbit among the traditional trappings, feels like a forbidden ritual.  Hvistendahl does not allow this demarcation of continuing life to last for long as the film quickly switches to Mahler and Anna (Renate Reinsve) while the man desperately tries to engage with the supernaturally revived Elias through a remote control car he keeps driving towards the boy.  The scene feels desperate, purposefully so, as the father tries to make sense of his son’s passing as if he is bargaining and bribing a force greater than himself to try and bring him back.  The script does not interrogate this – or any of these stories – with words, only images that evoke a strong feeling. 

Those looking for more of a story will find Handling the Undead a frustrating experience, even with its menagerie of characters from all walks and stages of life, further so as their appetite is teased with the breadcrumbs of a larger, more cohesive narrative from Hvistendahl that never quite takes shape.  This comes most explicitly through Anna who works in food service, packaging meals, and bringing our own understanding of zombies and infections – two things that often go hand in hand – we are waiting for the outbreak to be linked to her involvement in distributing meals.  The narrative irony is perfect, providing life-sustaining meals to the community while unknowingly or ignorantly ignoring the risk posed by her interactions with Elias while at home.  Instead, the film presents itself as a collection of short films, witnessed as if traveling by carousel which thankfully spares us of the dreaded anthology format, but leaves us begging for some more crossover and connective tissue than just that these three families are haunted by a necromantic plague.  This scab is continually scratched leading David to begin questioning why only some people came back and others did not.  Was his sorrow not strong enough to breach the fabric of life and bring back his own past relatives? Did those who return have more left to give?  These questions are asked, but not answered in true philosophical manner that works well in the pages of a novel but leaves audiences to a film feeling jipped from a more full experience. It is still a successful thought experiment, but as a film, it is understandable why it struggled in the theatrical landscape especially given its genre associations.  The film has an almost total rejection of violence or blood, but in its pursuit of a less stained narrative, it greatly weakens the grip of the monkey paw that holds the narrative in its palm. 

Handling the Undead is an avant-garde approach to genre filmmaking which seems like a bit of an oxymoron, and Hvistendahl struggles to really change that impression.  Volleying between three scattered and unconnected stories for the first third, it is not until about the half-hour mark that they begin to become connected by the larger plot point of the dead rising from their graves.  This multifaceted narrative has become something of a calling card for Lindqvist who has cemented himself as one of the premiere voices in modern horror writing, but this lack of intersection may be more indicative of a flaw in his sophomore novel than one of the film’s own making.  It feels too severe a critique to say that the film overcomplicated its simple premise, but it does make this rather simple story hard to break into for the casual viewer.  That being said, when given the chance, audiences across the spectrum will be able to mine this film for nuggets of intellectual enjoyment as death touches us all, and there are few if any of us who would not wish for a few more precious hours to say goodbye.