Handling the Undead

Hvistendahl treats the audience with respect, her and Lindqvist’s reworking of the latter’s source material respectful, intelligent, and overflowing in empathy.

Composer Peter Raeburn’s beautifully sad soundtrack along with Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography contribute to creating a tragic mood that’s hard to let go of after the film’s sad conclusion.

The cooking comparison for Handling the Undead would be a sauce that’s broken, its elements having separated. There’s a genuine sense of lived-in sadness here, but this would-be elegy doesn't offer quite enough mesmeric insights to justify its somberness.

“Handling the Undead” also eschews any of the practical questions, but with a more humanist intent: to lean single-mindedly into its characters’ emotions — and also its eerie mythical resonance.

Hvistendahl’s film is absorbing, even captivating at times. But it moves at a pace that can be charitably described as “measured.” (The uncharitable word is “sluggish.”)

It’s an incredibly somber film, one washed in hues of blue and green, and it gets under your skin, making you question how you would react if you could have more time with a lost loved one, even if you knew immediately there would be a cost.

It’s not about a descent into apocalypse, or the loathsome human tendency to eat ourselves. Instead, it’s a slow story about the blank, numb emptiness of grief.

Handling the Undead won’t deliver the shocks and dyed-red corn syrup you may expect. But for an art film with more on its mind than gruesome slaughter, it delivers.

The downbeat tone means that this isn't an easy film to watch, and it holds its nerve by never offering much hope.

An uneasy and somber atmospheric zombie tale on grief.