Early in Handling the Undead, an adolescent girl, Flora (Inesa Dauksta), plays a video game where shooting zombies is your ticket to staying alive. Rendered in crude 3D, these shambling, emaciated, flesh-hungry zombies are the familiar sort that have haunted the pop-cultural imagination, and this depiction stands in seeming contrast to the people who came back from the dead after a mysterious event in Thea Hvistendahl’s film. They don’t do much of anything except breath and stare from behind glassy eyes at a world we’re never really sure if they can comprehend. But while they’re shells of who they once were, silent and often immobile, they recall enough of where they came from to reach out to the people who grieve them.
Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hvistendahl, the film moves between three non-intersecting subplots. In one, we...
Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hvistendahl, the film moves between three non-intersecting subplots. In one, we...
- 1/29/2024
- by Steven Scaife
- Slant Magazine
Perhaps the best way to describe the Norwegian zombie movie, Handling the Undead (Handtering av Udode), is as a mournful reflection on grief, on the struggle of the bereaved to let go of their departed loved ones. Based on the book by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, whose debut novel, Let the Right One In, became one of the best vampire movies of the 21st century — yielding a solid enough American remake, a so-so Showtime series and an innovative British stage adaptation — Thea Hvistendahl’s debut feature is a slow-burn experience that demands patience.
The degree to which that patience is rewarded will depend on the viewer’s willingness to get lost in the mood of pervasive anxiety and sorrow in a movie whose elegant restraint make it more psychological study than horror. That applies even once the rotting flesh-eaters have been revealed. One selling point of the multistrand drama...
The degree to which that patience is rewarded will depend on the viewer’s willingness to get lost in the mood of pervasive anxiety and sorrow in a movie whose elegant restraint make it more psychological study than horror. That applies even once the rotting flesh-eaters have been revealed. One selling point of the multistrand drama...
- 1/20/2024
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In the realm of zombie-themed films, a genre often fliled with clichés and predictable plot lines, Handling the Undead aims to stand out as something different.
Directed by Thea Hvistendahl, and written by Hvistendahl and John Ajvide Lindqvist, the film stars Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum, Bahar Pars, Inesa Dauksta, Olga Damani, and Kian Hansen.
The story takes a subtle approach, diverging from the expected scenes of chaos and horror, while focusing on three families set against a backdrop of an apocalyptic event. The narrative is an exploration of human response to the unimaginable.
Handling the Undead opens with the camera hovering over a large apartment complex in the middle of a hot Oslo summer. Mahler (Sundquist) walks up the stairs to an apartment where his granddaughter (Reinsve) is blasting bossa nova music and painting her toenails before getting ready for work. There are pictures of...
Directed by Thea Hvistendahl, and written by Hvistendahl and John Ajvide Lindqvist, the film stars Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum, Bahar Pars, Inesa Dauksta, Olga Damani, and Kian Hansen.
The story takes a subtle approach, diverging from the expected scenes of chaos and horror, while focusing on three families set against a backdrop of an apocalyptic event. The narrative is an exploration of human response to the unimaginable.
Handling the Undead opens with the camera hovering over a large apartment complex in the middle of a hot Oslo summer. Mahler (Sundquist) walks up the stairs to an apartment where his granddaughter (Reinsve) is blasting bossa nova music and painting her toenails before getting ready for work. There are pictures of...
- 1/20/2024
- by Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
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