Zombie movies aren’t known for being subtle. Restraint isn’t often an option when your antagonists’ weapons of choice are their own teeth. What they are is thematically malleable, able to used as a shambling cipher for anything from racism to consumerism. Thea Hvistendahl’s Handing the Undead manages both delicacy and thematic potency in a haunting and melancholy chiller. It’s one that is likely to fall between two stools but there is a dark, disturbing beauty that’s customary from the mind behind Let the Right One In.

On an unseasonably hot day in Oslo, a weird series of electrical disturbances signal the return to life of the recently deceased. Three different families in various stages of bereavement suddenly have to to reckon with the revenants of their loved ones. Single mother Anna (Renate Reinsve) and her father Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist) face the return of her son, the process of decomposition very much underway. David (Anders Danielsen Lie) and his children endure sudden, lurching grief at the loss of his wife Eva (Bahar Pars) in a car accident, and equally sudden hope as she awakes. Finally, an elderly woman, Tora (Bente Børsum) attends the funeral of her partner Elizabet (Olga Damani), only to find her sat silently at the kitchen table that evening.

While Handling the Undead is unquestionably a zombie movie in the classic Romero sense, it initially has more in common thematically with the French film an subsequent TV series Les Revenants, in which a community face a similar situation. Whereas the French series in particular deals with the holistic, societal effect of the returning dead, Hvistendahl’s film is much narrower in scope. There are nods to a wider Norwegian epidemic, but this is as much a character study of grief as a horror movie.

Understandably, the marketing for the film has focused on Reinsve and Danielsen Lie of The Worst Person in the World being reunited on screen, although this is misleading as the share no screen time. It’s suggestive of a property that is causing its distributors some headaches. It’s nowhere near propulsive and visceral enough for a midnight movie audience, but there’s enough gristly pulp sensibility to turn off an arthouse devotee. It’s a shame, since Handling the Undead demonstrates the two can clearly exist, far more comfortably than the living and the undead in the film in fact.

It’s a rewarding, moving experience if you can adjust to several factors: the glacial pacing for one. The ambiguity of the situation for another. Why have they returned? What is the cut off point, how long dead does someone have to be before they stay dead? And finally, the sheer, intense seriousness of it all. This is the kind of stereotypical Nordic gloom for which films like The Seventh Seal have been unfairly mocked for over half a century. The tone is endlessly oppressive.

Yet, if you can engage with its lugubrious atmosphere, there is some undeniably powerful imagery. Anna’s whimpering, bloated son is as horrific in his own way as the dead boy at the kitchen table in Demián Rugna‘s Terrified. A slow dance between Tora and Elizabet to Nina Simone‘s exquisite ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ feels elegantly, empathetically allegorical for living with a loved one succumbing to dementia. And a gift of a rabbit for Eva has horrible consequences in one of the few genuinely visceral moments.

Blessed, or cursed, with a crushing ambience of grief – it’s fresh rawness and the horrendous numb stasis of the aftermath – Handling the Undead is a demanding film on many levels, including on one’s patience at times. However, like the finest zombie films, there are many questions it asks about humanity; not least our connections to our loved ones. Would we rather they live in a diminished state, or is it kinder for them (and us) to let them go? Ironically, this subgenre is often pretty good at probing at the soul.

Screened as part of Sundance Festival 2024