Courtesy of Sudance Institute
PARK CITY, Utah—One of the millennium’s finest horror films, 2008’s Let the Right One In—an adaptation of Swedish novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist’s first novel about the friendship between an adolescent boy and an eternal vampire with a young girl’s body—was encased in the sort of damp, stale, unforgiving chilliness normally reserved for crypts. Though not set in a tomb (or amidst the wintery snow), Handling the Undead, based on Lindqvist’s third book, boasts a similarly icy reserve, as well as revisits the relationship between those who do, and at one point did not, boast a pulse. Eerily still, morose and minimalist, Thea Hvistendahl’s directorial debut, which just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is a zombie film unlike any other, focused less on mayhem than on grief, loss, and the quiet, tragic terror begat by the dead’s return.
Working from a script co-written with Lindqvist, Hvistendahl stages Handling the Undead as a dialogue-light funereal march performed by disparate individuals who don’t realize, initially, that they’re heading toward their potential doom. In an apartment complex that looks no different from the many surrounding it, elderly Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist) moves about his residence without making a sound, his despondent body language suggesting a crushing weight upon his heart. Mahler packs food into a plastic bag and departs, and after gazing at him through narrow passageways, the film watches him from the building’s rooftop as he shuffles into an adjacent high-rise. There, he lets himself into the flat owned by his daughter Anna (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve), who doesn’t stop painting her toenails to answer the door and, upon seeing her dad, coldly ignores him, her animosity as silent as it is brutal. A child’s forsaken bedroom indicates the source of their pain.
While Anna works in a kitchen preparing trays of food for unknown customers and Mahler wraps up yet another dinner that he knows Anna won’t eat, Handling the Undead shifts its attention to two additional subjects. At a church, senior citizen Tora (Bente Børsum) says farewell to her partner Elisabet (Olga Damani) and returns to an apartment full of flowers and memories that bring her no solace. In a different home, teenager Flora (Inesa Dauksta) plays a zombie-slaughtering video game and responds rudely to her mother Eva’s (Bahar Pars) request that she babysit her younger brother Kian (Kian Hansen), since Eva is going out and her husband David (Anders Danielsen Lie, also of The Worst Person in the World fame) has a stand-up comedy gig. Later, following his routine at the club, David receives a shattering phone call informing him that Eva has died in a car accident.