Handling the Undead

A woman dies on the operating table, only to abruptly stir. A man’s graveside visitation is disturbed by the distant sound of knocking from under the earth. A woman awakens to find her partner suddenly restored to her. It is these uncanny occurrences that form the backbone of Thea Hvistendahl’s eerily composed supernatural grief drama, but its core is located in the absences found between these scant story beats. Urban spaces appear desolate even before the dead come alive, while only sudden intrusions of sound, the drone of a choir and terse exchanges of words alleviate the oppressive quiet.

There are times when a genuine ring of emotional truth is found in the muted reserve of Hvistendahl’s approach, such as when Renate Reinsve’s bereaved mother switches on the bedroom lights to see her late son illuminated before her. Instead of the expected outcry, she promptly switches them back off, turns around and lights a cigarette. Brief though it is, this moment is enough to convey an entire history of loss and false hope. By contrast, long stretches of Handling the Undead can also feel frustratingly vague.

To simply show those who are grieving is one thing, but to share in their grief is to sense the warmth of what they’ve lost, to trace the outline of the space they’ve tried, inadequately, to fill with something else. We may see an ageing woman (Benta Borsum) overlooking her partner’s (Olga Demani) decayed appearance to take her back into her bed, but the personal history this bleak new norm has replaced remains blank. In its absence, much of the tenderness that could make its loss tangibly felt is drained away. Only the film’s dramatic conclusions are left, and they are easy enough to discern: let go of what is gone. Do not cling to it in hopes of reclaiming what was lost. But with so few beams of light in Hvistendahl’s overbearingly grey Norway, another adage rings truer still: you can’t miss what you never had.

Still, it’s tempting to entertain the possibility that this chilliness is intended to underline the numbing nature of grief; the lack of detail in its characterisation, a deliberate encouragement to viewers to project their own loves and losses into the empty spaces onscreen. For all the times Handling the Undead feels as cadaverously cold as the revenants onscreen, Hvistendahl’s filmmaking is too commanding, too patiently controlled, to be wholly dismissed.

Thomas Messner

Handling the Undead does not have a UK release date yet.

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