‘Handling the Undead’ Review: A Zombie Drama With a Beating Heart Under Rotting Flesh

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic 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 following its premiere in Sundance’s World Dramatic competition: More disquieting than scary, and certainly not bloody enough for the midnight-movie crowd, its horror trappings might still deter arthouse viewers drawn by the prospect of a reunion between “The Worst Person in the World” stars Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie. (It isn’t one, as such: Their strands never intersect in a loosely knit ensemble piece.) These contradictions are features, not bugs: Full of frail, mortal feeling and overcast last-days imagery, “Handling the Undead” lingers coolly in the bones longer than many zombie films that offer more immediate, grisly gratification.