HANDLING THE UNDEAD Depicts The Zombie Attack of Grief

Loss will eat you.

Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead, based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, is ostensibly a zombie pic. But in fact, the film is more closely related to literary ghost stories than to genre horror. 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.

The movie is set on a hot summer day in Oslo, where, after a mysterious electrical outage, recently dead people begin to come back to life. An elderly man, Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist) hear’s his grandson Elias pounding on his coffin in the graveyard; he digs him up and brings him back to the boy’s grief-paralyzed mother Anna (Renata Reinsve.) An elderly woman, Tora (Bente Børsum) returns from the funeral of her lover Elisabet (Olga Damani); shortly afterwards Elisabet is at her door. Stand-up comic David (Anders Danielsen Lie) learns that his wife Eva (Bahar Pars) died in a car crash; stunned, he sits at her hospital bed—and is startled when she starts to show signs of life.

Each of these three storylines provides a subtly different variation on the quiet agony of loss. David, his teen daughter Flora (Inesa Dauksta), and his young son Kian (Kian Hansen) are caught in a medical hell of uncertainty; the hospital can’t explain Eva’s condition, and greets David’s frantic inquiries with indifference bordering on hostility. Elisabet is nonresponsive and appears to be in cognitive decline; Tora is caring for someone who in most ways that matter isn’t really there. As for Anna and Mahler, Elias never really left; the zombie child is just a reiteration of the absent presence around which their lives orbit in a helpless groove of misery, recrimination, and pain.

Hvistendahl provides little in the way of zombie rampage or zombie carnage. Instead, the movie is a long meditation on what isn’t there. Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s camera lingers on still, angular, off-center compositions of empty stairwells; in one hospital sequence, half the screen is blacked out, and you watch a zombie body slide out of the dark into an MRI machine, a passage from nothing into nowhere.

The sound design is analagously filled with semi-audible ambient noise, clicks, hums. Peter Raeburn’s music is centered on Pauline Oliveros-esque drones, so that the characters seem to wander through echoing corridors of pulsing lacunae. Whether in Mahler’s Oslo apartment or at the island cabin where they take the boy to avoid the police, Elias is accompanied by the buzzing of flies—which Anna studiously ignores, as she ignores his deathly pallor.

Small zombie horror gestures do sneak in towards the last third of the film. When Tora tries to feed her lover some toast, Elisabet snaps at her with an ominous animal hunger. A lone, menacing zombie shows up at Anna’s cabin, slapping futilely at the window.

These moments of violence are so slowed down and decentered that they don’t really register as genre pleasures. Instead, they function as a metaphor for the way grief devours. The dead become hungry, insatiable, pitiless doppelgangers of themselves, offering neither solace nor explanation as they reach out their claws for their loved ones’ hearts. The victims here have no defense, not because infection is uncontainable, and not because the zombie hordes are numberless, but simply because no one can protect themselves from losing a child, a lover, a parent. Grief pulls on its second-hand skin and caresses you with a gentleness that is unendurable.

Just as loss has no cure, it has no real end. Sure enough the film provides little in the way of resolution. We do not learn what caused the zombie plague, or whether it stopped, or what happened to the rest of the world. Anna, David, and Tora have to figure out how to go on living, or not, much as they would have if zombies didn’t exist. There is no way to handle the undead. And yet, we all have to handle them anyway. That’s why Handling the Undead is such a heartbreaking film.