“Handling the Undead” is a horror movie directed by Thea Hvistendahl starring Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bahar Pars and Bjørn Sundquist.
“Handling the Undead” is a horror film directed by Thea Hvistendahl and starring Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bahar Pars, and Bjørn Sundquist. Life surprises us, and that has happened with the title that concerns us today, “Handling the Undead,” a movie with many virtues that, at the same time, and contradictorily, a great drawback: it doesn’t resemble George A. Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead.
“Handling the Undead” is a talent-packed movie that takes the zombie and horror genre to a more intellectual, almost reflective state, stylized visually, and hitting the horror cinema stuck in clichés of all kinds, various scares, and bloody scenes.
“Handling the Undead” is a film that seeks to go beyond zombies and go beyond horror cinema with a movie without scares, without daunting scenes, with elaborate characters, and an almost pictorial construction of its sequences. Yes, a revolutionary film that owes to its director, Thea Hvistendahl, who did an excellent job on her second film after “Children of Satan” (2019).
Plot
In one night in Norway, the dead begin to come back to life for no apparent reason.
About the Movie
“Handling the Undead” is above all, a fantastic film looking to turn the archetypes of the horror genre upside down, seeking to make a horror movie through its settings, music, suspense, and the gloominess of its images. It has a slow, calm pace, with more dramatic than horrifying scenes and delves deeper into the existential pain of death than in showing terror sequences. It has excellent photography, and the actors excel in one of those films with characters they enjoy portraying.
However, it is a movie that doesn’t seem to be going to please genre lovers, in a film that varies a genre that otherwise is characterized by the almost religious repetition of the same successful formula, with more or less spectacular variants.
Anyone looking for a zombie movie will be deeply disappointed, as will those looking for a bloody horror film. “Handling the Undead” reminds us by the way it is built – a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann in terms of rhythm and calm of the story, its ambiance, and its reflective theme and the ideas it contains. It also reminds us of the paintings of John Singer Sargent in terms of the stillness and unmovability of its figures and the composition of the shots.
A story filled with sadness, melancholy, and beauty.
Our Opinion
Give it a chance because “Handling the Undead” is undoubtedly worth it. An attempt to give a twist to horror cinema in one of its most recognized sub-genres, that of zombies.
A movie that is elegant in its visual style and revolutionary in its approach to the genre.
A huge success for its young director.
