Norwegian film “Handling the Undead” is a dry and detached genre piece simply going all the way for its unsettling mood. Without explaining a lot about its story premise, the movie calmly and distantly observes its several main characters facing an inexplicable happening which gradually disturbs them along the story, and this is interesting for a while before eventually spinning its wheels around its inevitable conclusion.

 The early part of the film establishes the respective grieving status of the main characters. At first, we are introduced to a young woman and her aging father, and we come to gather that they have been quite devastated by the recent death by her young son. Both of them are so isolated in each own grief that they barely speak with each other, and the movie phlegmatically depicts how they go through each own daily life as struggling more and more with each own grief.

In case of one stand-up comedian, he and his two children happen to be suddenly struck by an unexpected bad news. His wife has a serious car accident, and she is already dead when he hurriedly arrives at a local hospital. While he is at a loss about how to deliver this bad news to his children, something quite unbelievable happens right in front of him. His wife’s body shows some movement, and it looks like she comes back from death.

Meanwhile, a similar thing happens to the aforementioned young woman and her old father. While grieving over his grandson’s grave, the old man hears something from the ground beneath the grave, and he soon begins to dig up the grave. What do you know, his grandson looks alive again, and we subsequently see him washing his grandson in his and his daughter’s apartment.

Needless to say, his daughter is quite shocked to see her son back in the apartment. As a matter of fact, she even thinks she is going crazy due to her immense grief, but she eventually comes to see that she is not crazy at all. Although she does not know what to do about her son just like her father, both of them are a bit glad to get back him again, and they are willing to keep him as much as possible.

Another part of the story involves with an aging lesbian couple. After one of them died, her partner is quite overwhelmed by the sense of loss, but then her dear spouse soon returns from death to her surprise. Just like the other “undead” people in the story, her dear spouse merely shows little signs of life while looking not so capable of communication, but she is happy to get her spouse back nonetheless, and there is a poignant but unnerving scene where she is trying to make her spouse eat a bit.

The screenplay by director Thea Hvistendahl and her co-writer John Ajvide Lindqvist, which is based on the novel of the same name written by Lindqvist, leisurely rolls the story and characters under the ominously ambiguous atmosphere. It turns out that there are many other cases of people returning from death, but the movie does not go into details on how this can happen, and we can only guess that this happening is associated with a mysterious incident which occurred right before that.

The tension of the movie comes from how the main characters feel conflicted about how they should respond to their respective circumstances. While the young woman and her father become more protective of her “undead” son, we cannot help but notice the decomposed status of his body, which is frequently emphasized by the buzzing sound of flies around him. In case of that old lesbian couple, the living partner of that “undead” woman tries to make everything comfortable for her “undead” spouse, but she is reminded more of the disturbing aspects of her circumstance.

Not so surprisingly, there come some nasty moments during the last act as expected, and that is where the movie begins to lose its tension and narrative momentum. As consequently entering familiar genre territories, the movie coldly disturbs us more, but we remain distant to the story and characters because of its rather thin storytelling and flat characterization, and that is the main reason why its last scene feels more like a mere whimper instead of being emotionally devastating.

At least, the main cast members fill their respective roles with some genuine emotions. While Renate Reinsve, who surely had a busy year as appearing in several other films including “A Different Man” (2024) and Apple+ TV drama series “Presumed Innocent”, and Anders Danielsen Lie, who incidentally appeared along with Reinsve in Joachim Trier’s Oscar-nominated film “The Worst Person in the World” (2021), are the most notable members in the cast, the other cast member including Bjørn Sundquist and Bente Børsum are equally solid in their substantial part, and Børsum deftly handles her several wordless but effective moments in the film. 

On the whole, “Handling the Undead”, which is Hvistendahl’s second feature film after “The Monkey and the Mouth” (2017), is admirable to some degree for its dry handling of familiar genre elements, but I must say that I felt impatient more than once during my viewing because of its glacial narrative pacing and shallow characterization. Anyway, Hvistendahl shows some potential as a good filmmaker, and I can only hope that her next film will interest and engage me more.