Handling The UndeadImage: Neon
The zombie genre has proven wildly adaptable, transcending cultures and national borders. Plenty of efforts trade in action-horror mayhem, while others use a return of the (generally flesh-craving) undead as an inciting incident for grander social statements or inquiries pegged to societal breakdown. In terms of explorative value,...
The zombie genre has proven wildly adaptable, transcending cultures and national borders. Plenty of efforts trade in action-horror mayhem, while others use a return of the (generally flesh-craving) undead as an inciting incident for grander social statements or inquiries pegged to societal breakdown. In terms of explorative value,...
- 6/5/2024
- by Brent Simon
- avclub.com
The zombie genre resides comfortably under the umbrella of horror that it is rarely explored through different means. Then, you have films like Maggie, which stars Arnold Schwarzenegger in a rare dramatic turn, that features the concept in a different light. Prepare for the emotion and despair of seeing your loved ones return in an unnatural manner in the trailer for the Norway horror drama Handling the Undead. The film is based on the novel Hanteringen av odöda from the Let the Right One In author, John Ajvide Lindqvist. The new haunting trailer was just released by Neon.
The official synopsis from Neon reads,
“On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want? A family is faced with the mother’s reawakening before they...
The official synopsis from Neon reads,
“On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want? A family is faced with the mother’s reawakening before they...
- 5/8/2024
- by EJ Tangonan
- JoBlo.com
Renate Reinsve in Handling The Undead. Peter Raeburn: 'When you're working on a film like this, it's like being part of a band, and I play one instrument, someone else plays another and everyone's very respectful' Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Zombie movies traditionally involve lurching cadavers and adrenaline-rush horror. Thea Hvistendahl takes an altogether slower and more sorrowful approach with her debut Handling The Undead, which is adapted by Let The Right One In’s John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own book. The drip of dread and the horror of grief come together in this trio of tales in which, after a strange event in a hot Oslo summer, families find their loved ones rising from the grave. In one corner of the city, Renate Reinsve’s Anna and her father (Bjørn Sundquist) try to help her son, with his rasping breath and buzzing flies telling us all...
- 2/6/2024
- by Amber Wilkinson
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
The first word that comes to mind when thinking of how to write about Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead is: dread. To expand: slow, ponderous dread. Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist (and based on his novel of the same name), this is a zombie movie in the tradition of the author’s own Let the Right One In. There are zombies here but, as with the vampires in the latter work, the focus is elsewhere, mostly. Its genre construct is meant to elevate a deeper kind of pain. In this incarnation, a series of sad people dealing with different variations of grief must contend with an unsettling new reality: those loved ones they’ve buried have come back to life.
But only somewhat. Stand-up comedian David (Anders Danielsen Lie) loses his wife (Bahar Pars) in a car accident, forced to face their two children in the immediate aftermath. Hours later,...
But only somewhat. Stand-up comedian David (Anders Danielsen Lie) loses his wife (Bahar Pars) in a car accident, forced to face their two children in the immediate aftermath. Hours later,...
- 1/29/2024
- by Dan Mecca
- The Film Stage
Early in Handling the Undead, an adolescent girl, Flora (Inesa Dauksta), plays a video game where shooting zombies is your ticket to staying alive. Rendered in crude 3D, these shambling, emaciated, flesh-hungry zombies are the familiar sort that have haunted the pop-cultural imagination, and this depiction stands in seeming contrast to the people who came back from the dead after a mysterious event in Thea Hvistendahl’s film. They don’t do much of anything except breath and stare from behind glassy eyes at a world we’re never really sure if they can comprehend. But while they’re shells of who they once were, silent and often immobile, they recall enough of where they came from to reach out to the people who grieve them.
Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hvistendahl, the film moves between three non-intersecting subplots. In one, we...
Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hvistendahl, the film moves between three non-intersecting subplots. In one, we...
- 1/29/2024
- by Steven Scaife
- Slant Magazine
A loud, high-pitched sound echoes through the streets of Oslo. Car alarms start going off everywhere. A citywide blackout begins. An elderly man, draped over his grandson’s grave, begins to hear the sound of muffled knocks coming from under the ground. “Grandpa is coming,” he says repeatedly. He grabs a shovel and begins to dig. So begins Handling the Undead, Thea Hvistendahl‘s somber feature directorial debut that acts as a haunting meditation on grief, daring to ask us what we would do if someone we loved returned from the dead.
Adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s (Let the Right One In) 2005 novel of the same name (he also co-wrote the screenplay with Hvistendahl), Handling the Undead chronicles the lives of three families as they deal with the sudden return of their recently deceased loved ones. Anna is saved from a suicide attempt when her father Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist...
Adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s (Let the Right One In) 2005 novel of the same name (he also co-wrote the screenplay with Hvistendahl), Handling the Undead chronicles the lives of three families as they deal with the sudden return of their recently deceased loved ones. Anna is saved from a suicide attempt when her father Mahler (Bjørn Sundquist...
- 1/26/2024
- by Trace Thurman
- bloody-disgusting.com
Sundance film festival: The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve leads a dour film about families dealing with the reappearance of deceased loved ones
The dead are returning in the chilly Norwegian drama Handling the Undead, a sad, somber attempt to guide the zombie genre from midnight movie to arthouse. It works in parts, as a study of the ache and irrationality of grief, asking its characters how much they’re willing to accept and deny in order to see their loved ones again. But the first-time director Thea Hvistendahl’s patience-insisting slow burn can be testing, like watching a block of ice slowly melt, a story told in the smallest of drips, some of which sink in deeper than others.
On a summer’s day in Oslo, three different dynamics are upended by this confounding re-emergence. A single mother (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate...
The dead are returning in the chilly Norwegian drama Handling the Undead, a sad, somber attempt to guide the zombie genre from midnight movie to arthouse. It works in parts, as a study of the ache and irrationality of grief, asking its characters how much they’re willing to accept and deny in order to see their loved ones again. But the first-time director Thea Hvistendahl’s patience-insisting slow burn can be testing, like watching a block of ice slowly melt, a story told in the smallest of drips, some of which sink in deeper than others.
On a summer’s day in Oslo, three different dynamics are upended by this confounding re-emergence. A single mother (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate...
- 1/24/2024
- by Benjamin Lee in Park City, Utah
- The Guardian - Film News
Perhaps the best way to describe the Norwegian zombie movie, Handling the Undead (Handtering av Udode), is as a mournful reflection on grief, on the struggle of the bereaved to let go of their departed loved ones. Based on the book by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, whose debut novel, Let the Right One In, became one of the best vampire movies of the 21st century — yielding a solid enough American remake, a so-so Showtime series and an innovative British stage adaptation — Thea Hvistendahl’s debut feature is a slow-burn experience that demands patience.
The degree to which that patience is rewarded will depend on the viewer’s willingness to get lost in the mood of pervasive anxiety and sorrow in a movie whose elegant restraint make it more psychological study than horror. That applies even once the rotting flesh-eaters have been revealed. One selling point of the multistrand drama...
The degree to which that patience is rewarded will depend on the viewer’s willingness to get lost in the mood of pervasive anxiety and sorrow in a movie whose elegant restraint make it more psychological study than horror. That applies even once the rotting flesh-eaters have been revealed. One selling point of the multistrand drama...
- 1/20/2024
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
If zombies weren’t so fixated on eating our brains, perhaps they’d be poignant to have around: semi-living, semi-breathing semblances of people we’ve loved, there to be seen and held and talked to, not truly present but not absent either. Whether that’s preferable to the void of death is the question underpinning “Handling the Undead” for much of its running time, even as the threat of the undead reverting to their usual habits gives this soft, sorrowful bereavement drama a core of cold-blooded horror. Thea Hvistendahl’s impressively restrained debut feature may keep its genre intentions just up its sleeve until the final act, but it never feels like a trick or a compromise: It’s a living-dead nightmare with a brain and a heart and, most importantly and inedibly, a soul.
The film’s somewhat liminal genre identity presents marketing challenges for U.S. distributor Neon...
The film’s somewhat liminal genre identity presents marketing challenges for U.S. distributor Neon...
- 1/20/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
In the realm of zombie-themed films, a genre often fliled with clichés and predictable plot lines, Handling the Undead aims to stand out as something different.
Directed by Thea Hvistendahl, and written by Hvistendahl and John Ajvide Lindqvist, the film stars Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum, Bahar Pars, Inesa Dauksta, Olga Damani, and Kian Hansen.
The story takes a subtle approach, diverging from the expected scenes of chaos and horror, while focusing on three families set against a backdrop of an apocalyptic event. The narrative is an exploration of human response to the unimaginable.
Handling the Undead opens with the camera hovering over a large apartment complex in the middle of a hot Oslo summer. Mahler (Sundquist) walks up the stairs to an apartment where his granddaughter (Reinsve) is blasting bossa nova music and painting her toenails before getting ready for work. There are pictures of...
Directed by Thea Hvistendahl, and written by Hvistendahl and John Ajvide Lindqvist, the film stars Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum, Bahar Pars, Inesa Dauksta, Olga Damani, and Kian Hansen.
The story takes a subtle approach, diverging from the expected scenes of chaos and horror, while focusing on three families set against a backdrop of an apocalyptic event. The narrative is an exploration of human response to the unimaginable.
Handling the Undead opens with the camera hovering over a large apartment complex in the middle of a hot Oslo summer. Mahler (Sundquist) walks up the stairs to an apartment where his granddaughter (Reinsve) is blasting bossa nova music and painting her toenails before getting ready for work. There are pictures of...
- 1/20/2024
- by Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
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