Zombies can be used for anything. They are versatile symbols of our relationship to death and an unexamined life. They make us consider our sense of mortality; they are us, but dead. Handling the Undead is a plodding Swedish zombie film that uses the undead for an obvious and laborious metaphor — an electromagnetic wave ripples through Stockholm, reanimating the corpses of the recently departed. Now, families must sit and grieve with their reawakened kin, and we sit with them in thickly atmospheric grayscale silence as they mourn and reflect upon the loss and rebirth of the undead. Adapted from Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist — whose novels Let the Right One In and Border have already enjoyed successful adaptations — Handling the Undead approaches the hard-to-film scenario of quiet grief with all the aesthetic severity you may expect from a Scandinavian drama with horror notes.
Slow zombies are always a choice. They do not have to move quickly. When they are slow, dread is pushed to the forefront. We feel the tension. These zombies aren’t going anywhere fast. They’re dead as a doornail and this movie isn’t about them encroaching en masse upon a group of survivors. This movie is about a group of survivors sitting with their dead, in mourning. Soaking in the grief. It’s about what it means to survive and what it means to die. The film is presented without much ornamentation. It has several key horror-like notes and sequences but it uses them differently. It presents known scenarios within zombie films and then says, but sit and wait, and think about a loss that has already happened, not one which is yet to come.
Austere and serious, the film hopes that its slow quiet will fill the audience with self-reflection, perhaps, but it proves just to be morose and monotonous. Because the theme is so heavy and the symbolism is brought to the front, there’s nothing much to think about when the movie is slow, and it is always slow. Director Thea Hvistendahl has previously worked in music videos and understands how to establish a clear visual code and identifiable aesthetic language but the film lacks a narrative design with arcs or reasons for our engagement. The film gives us grief but nothing to develop the characters outside of their interior feelings. As such, the story must make the most sense as a novel, where the writer can intricately explore these layers, but they are unmoving on-screen, where we simply are viewers of this meditation on loss — it might have all the right themes but they do not take the shape of a compelling narrative movie.
Good casting solves several problems: Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie are compelling and both present layers of emotional depth. There’s just the matter of the languid movie in their way. It’s hard to imagine the film connecting beyond the clear symbolism that’s just implied when we think about zombies. We do not really need to sit in silence and with stark realism and consider it. It’s endemic in the presentation of zombies. As such, the film requires a bit more than it has to give, as it’s hard to imagine this particular script lifting off the page and suiting the screen in the right way. It needs some cinematic element that seems to be missing — if it cannot find any narrative drive, perhaps it needs to utilize the visual storytelling to more deeply dig into the themes. As it sits, the film is a mournful and sad exhibit of the undead afterlife, seemingly drawn from a story of good potential, played with actors who do well, and directed with a clear style that doesn’t have anywhere to go. We begin to feel the turgid length midway through the film and perhaps in its biggest thematic victory, we too may begin to feel zombielike, just trying to get to the end.