Quite unlike what the title might suggest, Thea Hvistendahl’s Norwegian zombie film isn’t as interested in the undead as it is in the living. Grief doesn’t burden the dead. And since Handling the Undead, an adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel of the same name, is essentially a stoic observer of what people do when they lose someone close to them, grief is all there is to see. Hvistendahl’s film demands introspection as it puts you at the center of a three-way junction, with each direction leading to a singular experience—the dead coming back to those who love them dearly.
Spoiler Alert
What Is The Film About?
Considering the scarcity of spoken words in Handling the Undead, intruding into the headspaces of the people the film follows is your only shot at understanding it. The three families dealing with a wretched loss are connected by nothing else. And a varying spectrum of heartbreak is the connective neuron through which each family feels the emotions that dictate their lives. Anna’s increasingly disconnected from life since she’s lost her little boy, Elias. And her father, Mahler, though fiercely loving and caring toward his grieving daughter, is so consumed by pain that he sits near Elias’ grave for hours on end. Elderly Tora’s just bid goodbye to Elisabet, who I can only assume has been her longtime partner. Tora’s home is now overcome by this painful hollowness. And maybe only to submerge herself in the pain, lest distractions prove to be a betrayal of the love they had, Tora’s disconnected the phone. Little Kian was bouncing off the walls when his mom, Eva, went out to get him a rabbit for his birthday. Finding Eva mangled up and dead on the hospital bed following a freak accident was the last thing her husband, David, expected. But however devastating, death’s hardly the most shocking thing these three families are to experience. That said, the dead coming back is practically a desperate wish fulfillment for those who long to see their beloved one more time.
What makes the dead come back?
Handling the Undead is not too big on exposition. So, we don’t know exactly how long it’s been since Elias’ death. There’s no coming to terms with the loss of one’s child. But even though the weight of her grief makes her slouch, Anna drags herself through the tasks she needs to do to get by. The other two families haven’t been stewing in the pain long enough to actually internalize the loss. But strange phenomena of the universe do not care about a person’s circumstances. The true nature of the freak occurrence that raises the dead in Oslo isn’t spelled out. But from the looks of it, it’s of electromagnetic nature and affects the living and the dead. An inexplicable blackout takes over the city, following a strange wave of current flowing through it. Traffic signals go on the fritz.
Terrified of the unknown, migrating birds come together in massive flocks and fly haphazardly. And Anna has a near-brush with a terrifying accident when a ceiling fan drops on the platform she’s working on. It’s important to note that Eva’s death itself was a tragic outcome of this phenomenon. Her car radio was going haywire, and she was having the same buzzing headache that affected Mahler at the graveyard and made him pass out over Elias’ grave. So it’d be safe to assume that Eva passed out while driving and got into a fatal, fiery crash. But the most significant outcome of this phenomenon is that the dead are coming back. The doctors are just as dumbfounded as David when Eva wakes up, hours after being declared dead. Elisabet’s disfigured corpse walking into the house startles Tora. But when the most impossible wish comes true, you don’t question it. So fear is far from what Tora feels when she bathes Elisabeth, dresses her up in fresh clothes, and fulfills her wish of dancing with her beloved one last time. The same irrational hope is what makes Mahler dig up the grave when Elias knocks on the door of his little coffin. Elias’ cloudy eyes, bloated stomach, and decomposing skin aren’t nearly reason enough for Mahler to let go of his desperate hope.
Why does Anna drown Elias?
It’s one thing to have grief buried under the sediments of time. It doesn’t sting as bad as it once did. But the wounds of the three families in Handling the Undead are fresh. And considering how long it even takes for acceptance of the loss to come, it’s really no surprise that they embrace their undead loved ones like the unlikeliest blessings. Anna’s pain as the grieving mother of a little boy is the most volatile. So when she comes back home, unaware that her dad’s brought Elias back, she hears the distant coos and smells the stench of the dead, and she believes it’s her mind tormenting her. At that moment, Anna would’ve done anything to escape that agony. And so she does, as she saran wraps her head to suffocate herself. It would’ve been excruciating for her to be saved by her dad if he hadn’t led her to the room to see Elias. And just like her dad, Anna saw past the unmissable signs of decay on Elias and caught him in her embrace. But it wasn’t entirely without denial that Anna and Mahler perceived the situation. They knew why the police were at their door. They knew that nothing about Elias’s coming back from the dead was natural. So when they hide out at their cabin by the Oslo fjord, they’re actively denying the dark implications of their wish fulfillment.
Eva’s family, on the other hand, were left to deal with the peculiar turn of events on their own, as the hospital was pretty hush-hush about the tests they must’ve been running on Eva. David, Kian, and his sister Flora clung to normalcy, lest the hope of Eva’s return slip through their fingers. Kian did get the rabbit he was promised. And holding their hearts in their hands, they went to cheer Eva up at the hospital with the new family pet. It proves to be a particularly scarring moment for them, especially Kian, when a deadpan Eva crushes the little rabbit to death. It’s a life-altering experience of layered loss. They don’t just lose their pet to a dreadful death. They also come to accept that the person sitting in the hospital room isn’t Eva. The person who came back from the dead wasn’t the woman they loved with all their hearts.
For the most part, the undead in the film don’t particularly qualify as the zombies we’ve come to know in pop culture. They’re quiet, hardly mobile, and Elisabet even sheds a tear. The morbid realization and the bigger picture were kept for the ending sequence. And similar to the unexpected nature of loss, the dreadful truth about the undead crept up on their loved ones when they were only starting to think that there may be hope for a total recovery. But there’ve been times in Handling the Undead when the film found subtle ways to reveal that those who’ve come back are not quite human anymore. It’s clear from the way Elisabet bites on the toast—a grim foreshadowing of how she’ll bite into Tora’s face and kill her in the near future. In blink-and-miss scenes, the film has also made the scale of the phenomenon a little more comprehensible. There were reporters outside the hospital Eva was in. And the graves were being exhumed to find out how many of the dead had actually awakened.
In Handling the Undead’s ending we finally comprehend the nature of those who’ve come back alive. They are flesh-eating zombies. And a rather hungry one ambled behind Mahler’s boat when he hurried off to get water. The same zombie feasted on an unsuspecting Mahler when he charged at it. The morbid sight of this was enough for Anna to accept that the boy she was holding in her arms wasn’t Elias. And when he tried to take a bite out of her neck, Anna knew that the whole thing was a terribly cruel joke the world was playing on her. It’s this heartbreaking realization that’s reflected in her action when she comes to terms with the fact that her son is gone and drowns the zombie Elias. But maybe this wasn’t a bad thing after all. Drowning Elias was an act of saving herself too. Whatever comfort the undead Elias brought to her heart will probably keep her from wanting to put an end to her life. She believes that she will see him in another life. And that just might be enough for her to go on.
