Death has many victims. Beyond those who reach the end of their lifespan, there is the emotional fodder of those left in its wake. When you lose someone close to you, it’s always been the natural response to imagine they have transcended to a different, hopefully better place, and perhaps that they might even be there for us when the time comes. Depending on the belief system to which you subscribe, you might consider them as close to you as air always, even when their physical form is gone. But what if it’s not gone yet? What if it comes back? If the physical form makes its return, does that mean the loved one has come back too? Can we make ourselves believe that, really? At the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, writer/director Thea Hvistendahl interrogates the depth of love, loss and terror with HANDLING THE UNDEAD.
Based upon the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (author of Let the Right One In), HANDLING THE UNDEAD is a tale of recent, all-consuming loss eating away at various members of an Oslo community. As they grapple with the gaping maw of sorrow before them, a strange thing begins to happen—slowly, and then all at once, the recently dead return. Anna (Renate Reinsve), fresh from an attempt on her own life, is brought to her young son Elias, and Mahler (Bjørn Sundqvist) rediscovers his grandson. Tora (Bente Børsum) and Elisabet (Olga Damani) are lovers reunited. Meanwhile, David (Anders Danielsen Lie) must reckon with the ravaged appearance of his wife, recently in an accident and reanimated. All have died, and all returned, with slower heart rates and pallid skin and aching family in their wake begging for a return to normalcy.
If there is anything John Ajvide Lindqvist is known for, it is taking the dark, grim, and monstrous elements of a story and giving them so much soul it breaks you from inside. Even as we recoil from the horror, we find ourselves drawn in by the love so clearly laid bare on the screen and page before us. Thea Hvistendahl’s feature length debut is a tender dance with the material at hand. She is unafraid to make space for the parts of death and life that make us angry or sad or disgusted, even as she paints them with a tender hand. There is gentleness everywhere, even in the most visceral and violent moments. When things take the disturbing—yet perhaps inevitable—turn for the worse at the film’s climax, it is a shock we both do not see coming and may well have been bracing for the entire 99-minute runtime. The use of silence in the film’s beginning and building, sweeping score (created by William Bourassa-Bennett, Forest Christenson, Timbre Cierpke, and Thore Garberg) throughout sinks us immediately into an atmosphere that bristles with darkness even in its lightest moments.
Every performance is impactful and understated, giving audiences plenty of room to breathe and connect our own thoughts about how the characters might really be feeling about the strange happenings. There is an incredible amount of deeply moving facial work on everyone’s part. When death steals away our ability to smile and form speech, what are we left with if not emptiness and the closest approximation we can get to physical expression of daily life? Reinsve is the beating core of the film, but the character of Mahler is just as vital. Both orbit around this young boy, tragically and mysteriously taken entirely too early, and both want so desperately—despite the fear and confusion that plays on the forefront of their hearts—for him to be back, to be whole, to have returned to who he once was. But he is so clearly, deeply suffering in his not-life, that Anna decides she must make a choice. An impossible, gut wrenching, vital choice for her own sake and the sake of her family. She sees, perhaps clearer than anyone, what is really happening here.
HANDLING THE UNDEAD will unsettle you deep into your core long after the credits, as any Lindqvist work is apt to do, and Thea Hvistendahl has more than proven herself capable of the challenge of dancing on the knife’s edge of the haunting, atmospheric, heart-pulling horror.
HANDLING THE UNDEAD is coming soon from NEON.
Tags: Anders Danielsen Lie, Bente Borsum, Bjorn Sundqvist, Forest Christenson, Handling the Undead, Horror, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, neon, Olga Damani, Renate Reinsve, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival 2024, Thea Hvistendahl, Thore Garberg, Timbre Cierpke, William Bourassa-Bennett
No Comments