User reviews

Somehow they manged to take the original story and remove most of the interesting parts, leaving us with a slow and atmospheric exposé of loss and grief. What it does it does great, it's beautifully filmed and the acting is good, but it's just not enough. The entire point of having the dead come back to life is to examine all the implications of this happening, the original story understands this, it's in the title "Handling the undead", it asks the question of how to deal with this situation. But here most of those implications are glanced over or not touched upon at all, making the supernatural elements superfluous. Ultimately this movie had worked much better if it was just a story about three families experiencing loss, maybe in some kind of sliding doors scenario. It unfortunately feels like a missed opportunity and a waste of good source material.

In an already tired genre, Handling the Undead aims for a more contemplative and somber face than what we're used to with said genre. The standouts here being the music and atmosphere, one must think such a devotion to visuals would garner strong staying power, yet such was not the case. It's grief observed, through the lens of dark corridors and isolated pastures, asking the singular question, "if you had one more chance to talk to your loved one, what would you say?". Throughout the runtime I discovered the film wasn't exactly interested in exploring this question through a vessel or character of sorts, as it's practically nonexistent. In the end I was left starved, yearning for a connection. A film with a pulse that slowly fades into obscurity.

I basically cheer for European film. This movie got a lot of attention when it was released in Norway. Mostly because Renate Reinsve plays one of the lead roles, but also for the theme; What happens when the dead come back? In the many positive reviews of the film, the main characters' feelings of loss and grief were highlighted as the film's strengths.

The film is based on an interesting perspective; How would we react and listed if our dear deceased came back to us?

Since the film's focus is primarily about the main characters' behavior and reactions, this is to a small extent a "zombie movie". Fair enough.

But for me, the movie doesn't quite work. The film's lack of dialogue and storytelling deprives us of viewers the mility to get to know those involved in the film. It all gets too stagnant for me. And I lost interest in the movie while I saw it. When the movie towards the end finally takes some dramatic twists, it's too late.

But one case has the director succeeded; The creepy mood of the film persists from beginning to end.

First of all, I love what John Ajvide Lindqvist does. I read almost all of his books and every time it was a pure pleasure. However, he's very, very, extremely unlucky with the movie adaptations of his books. This particular movie... I don't know what it is and why it was made. For those who read the book it will be a torture, for those who didn't - just a dead-boring piece of crap.

Also, I don't think anyone in the team had any idea of what they were doing. The meaning of the book was completely different, and I mean 100% different. Why is there the Satanic cross on the poster? What Satan has to do with this movie and with this book?

The film discusses the idea of death and how we deal with it as humans How pain largely lies in the loss and absence of the feelings we need Death is likened in the film to the absence of feelings How the absence of feelings in humans is extremely terrifying and sometimes even harmful How this makes a person feel dead and unwanted What distinguishes life are feelings and the ability to express them, such as love, joy, fear and pain...and losing them is like death What connects us as humans are mutual feelings How a person is willing to abandon the people closest to him if he lacks certain feelings towards him and we reviewed this concept in the film on three different levels childhood, maturity, and old age, and I think that this gave greater depth to the message that the film wanted to convey The pace of the film is slow but very poetic and the soundtrack is beautiful.

I had the chance to see this for the Sundance film festival. I wish I had chosen something else. Anything else. This was almost the slowest thing I'd ever seen, and I just followed it up by watching "The Stalker" by Tarkovsky, so when I say slow--I mean sloooooooow. At least Tarkovsky had a meaning and philosophy being told as part of the story for you to ponder during slow scenes. This movie left you wishing everyone in it would die a horrible interesting death because their lives were so monotonous. There wasn't a single likeable character besides the innocent Kian, and he had essentially no lines! In fact there was hardly any dialogue of any kind in the entire movie. Hardly anything happened at all, then when something sorta kinda does, it ends abruptly. I've got the book, and "Let the Right One In" is one of my favorite movies and books, so it's not as if I'm not the right demographic here. This just has nothing going for it. I regret the time spent on it, the money spent, and the hours of backlash I had to hear afterward from my husband who was equally upset by the time he so rarely gets being wasted watching nothing happen. Boring doesn't even begin to describe it. More like mind numbing. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Slow. So sloooooow. And not a slow burn. I hate to say this, but I found it boring. I love bleak, atmospheric movies, but this one just made me sleepy. I really wanted to like it, so much so that I will probably give it another chance once it's released.

However, I had to close my eyes/ears/heart to the unnecessary, severe animal cruelty. It served little purpose and should have been handled differently.

I was excited to watch this film because I loved "Let the Right One In" and liked "The Worst Person in the World" but this film was a letdown.

Some of the atmospheric cinematography was nice but it was also slow and sleepy. I appreciated that it wasn't your typical jump-scare mainstream nonsense, but this movie really lacked heart. It lacked character development. I wanted to care more about the lives of the characters, but didn't.

The acting was good. The cinematography good, as mentioned. But the whole film was really lacking overall.

And the animal cruelty was disgusting/a cheap shock value gimmick. Does Norway have the same standards for animal welfare as the U. S./Hollywood? I sure hope so. Otherwise, I hope they are eventually slapped with hundreds of fines. That rabbit was clearly under severe genuine distress, in the very least.

An unfortunate waste of our $25 Sundance screening cost.

Life is many different things of course the vital signs detect your existence but is just a fluctuating wave on a screen ? Is it just the heart that beats ? Well the dead comes back to tell us otherwise and ones who take longer to grasp that ends up in tragedy. Great cinematography to capture the worlds of live and dead clashing. The pain of loss and the consumerist notions that envelopes all logic is sharply critisized even if it's between a mother and a kid. Strong emotional performances by the cast. Audio sits well with the emotions. Movie might be mislabeled yet it's unique story make it all worth.

99% of this snore fest is a collection of unwatchably slow and pointless scenes with no purpose other than to bore the audience to death. Truly unwatchable crap. May as well watch the paint peal, water boil, or some random old man's mouth while he eats (an actual scene in this abomination of a film)

If there was a plot.. it was lost in the sheer tedium. The only struggle here...the subplot is fighting with whomever you watch this with to see who gets to keep hitting the fast forward button. Not sure about raising the dead but certainly this movie could bore the audience into a state of utter zombification.

This film left med so disappointed and actually bored. I have nothing against slow paced movies but the slow pace and shots must eventually lead up to something taking the movie forward. This film does not do that. The film contains so many of these, in the end, meaningless crane and tracking shots. It has been suggested that it could be a silent movie. Well, it could have, but then again it is not. Since there actually is some dialogue in it ruining that aspect as well. It is NOT a zombie movie and if you see it as a regular drama movie it will certainly leave you disappointed. Adding to this is the constant irrational behaviour from the characters.

I read the book 10 or so years ago after having read Let the Right One In which I absolutely loved. I am now a fan of John Lindqvist and read everything he has written.

I can't remember a lot of the storyline but do remember some parts that I could almost smell the rot whilst reading.

For me this is about how life carries on whatever happens whether that is death, a pandemic or in this case something arguably worse. Everyone has a different way of dealing with life and what is thrown at them with the knowledge that we will all eventually pass and not return. Some acknowledge this whilst others think they are immortal.

The film could have been longer but I thought the score and atmosphere were especially well done.

First of all, this is so slow that it's almost unbearable to watch. I love art movies which are slow but this is not Ingmar Bergmann neither Tarkofsky nor Bela Tar. Did the creators of this movie think that their movie was something like that? A supernatural art drama? This is Hybris. A slow art drama should be meaningful, should be so poweful that makes its viewers think deep. Beautiful cinematography, visually stunning. HANDLING THE UNDEAD is nothing like that. This is one of the most boring movies in the history of cinema. I didn't mind much that nothing is being explained, i didn't mind its enigmatic/cryptic nature. However, it is so disjointed, incohesive and random that it has literally zero artistic value. Random things happening, nothing shocking though and still, i could respect this movie much more giving it a higher rating but the last 15 minutes are so ridiculous it hurts. During those last 15 minutes, this became something like a dumb horror movie, whereas the rest of the movie is a supernatural drama.

Icing on the cake, the last scene with the mother and the child. Supposedly, this should be the peak drama moment of the movie. And i burst out laughing.

If I told you a small country in northern Europe helped a debut-director in producing a zombie-movie barely surpassing 1,5 hours, would you recon on it being a movie of high quality? Probably not. Follow your gut feeling.

This movie features some great actors, and the plot is all right, but unfortunately it is just way too slow. And when it's not slow, it's boring. The film does capture a few beautiful moments between people. It does, however, stay quite shallow, leaving a lot of emotional potential behind.

Boring can still be beautiful, and the film does contain some great scenery. Some of the scenes does depict unusual, but intriguing, everyday situations in a brave manner. A focus on peculiar sound effects, albeit somewhat dramatic at times, also add a refreshing aspect to this easygoing one-and-a-half hour of my life.

This is not another "The worst person in the world", which i'm guessing a lot of people are looking for, and that's all right, but it is not good in and of itself either.

Whatever you're looking for, this probably ain't it. Unless you want to see what a 1,5 hour zombie-movie from a small country in northern Europe does to you.

This piece of art is an antidote to the fast paced tiktok media scape snd is painfully slow. But if you enter the movie with that in mind you are in for a treat. Tho the pace in the beginning makes your skin crawl you adjust to the mode of story telling and it becomes sort of a medative experience.

I have read the book and the movie has managed to the creeping discomfort of the book. The book is obviously more detailed in describing the emotions and thoughts of all involved plus tve scope of the incidence. The movie did it's best to relay that into the visual storytelling but I think they could have been a tad more detailed had they sped up the editing a bit while still maintaining the claustrophobic feel. What seemed like a day or two in the movie were weeks in the book if I don't recall wrong (it has been like ten years since I read it).

Other than that it is a fresh take on the zombie genre. Great acting, great score and great overall feel to the movie. I think the low scores here reflect that people were expecting a regular horror flic. See it as a philosophical meditation over death and grief and you will appreciate this art installation of a movie.

Extremely boring and stupid movie. Never seen anything worse. We felt like laughing because the film tried so hard to be something it wasn't. No edge, no emotion, no message. Nothing. We didn't get the chance to get to know the characters and their relationships to the main characters before they died. So when they returned to life we just didn't identify with any feelings the living had. And we couldn't care less. The movie is uninteresting on all levels and we just don't understand why all these fabolous actors wanted to Play in it. It' s a mysterium and it must be so embarrassing to them to see the film on screen.

This movie is slow, with a severe lack of story and dialogue.

With a great cast and interesting concept, this was a missed opportunity. I gave up an hour in

Ten minutes+ before a word was spoken. This would be excused if any semblance of visual story was told. Alas, nothing and I mean nothing happened in the meantime. When someone finally spoke, nothing was said. 30 minutes in, hoping that this "artistic choice" was made to set the tone for the film, I started skipping ahead. Whenever the subtitles popped up, I'd go back and watch it. Again, nothing of note was said

I gave up and I'm happy for it.

Eerie and somber example of Scandinavian elevated horror, that adapts a novel by the author of "Let the Right One In" and marks Thea Hvistendahl's debut as a feature film director. The movie offers a unique take on zombies, focusing more on grief and the human connection between the living and the undead rather than the familiar horror evoked by these creatures. Unfortunately, it moves at an excessively slow and contemplative pace, and eventually becomes exhausting in its tedium. To make matters worse, when events unfold exactly as expected, they do so without scares or surprises, failing to generate any genuine horror. The one highlight is the beautiful and melancholic score by composer Peter Raeburn, which lingers even after the film ends.

I knew that this movie existed as a novel, but I wasn't aware that they had filmed it, prior to actually stumbling upon it by random chance here in 2024. And of course, I opted to watch it, as I knew it was a zombie movie of sorts. I just didn't know what I was getting into here, as I haven't read the novel.

The storyline in "Håndtering Av Udøde" (aka "Handling the Undead"), as written by Thea Hvistendahl and John Ajvide Lindqvist utterly failed to properly entertain me, and it was quite a struggle to sit through 97 minutes of this slow paced nonsense. This movie is definitely not one that will easily find a place with the general audience, as it is somewhat of an acquired taste to watch.

It is a rather slow paced narrative that drives the movie. And you have to wait almost through half of the movie before something starts to happen. And I have to say that by then it was a bit too little, too late.

I was expecting this to be a horror movie, given the movie's title and the fact that there was an inverted cross on the movie's cover. Right, well the inverted cross on the cover of the movie makes no sense. For shock value perhaps? But it definitely had nothing to do with the contents of the storyline. And "Håndtering Av Udøde" proved to be a drama, not a horror movie.

Granted, while I do have John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel on the shelf in my collection of zombie books, I haven't read it yet. So I don't know how true this 2024 movie is to the source material in the novel. But I assume that the writer didn't make too many big changes, as he was also co-writing the screenplay for the movie. But then again, I am only speculating here.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, and while the movie's narrative was rubbish, then I will say that the acting performances were actually good.

The music in the movie was pretty good. It was a rather atmospheric and moody score that worked well, and would have worked even better, if the movie's narrative actually had proper contents and pacing.

The effects in the movie, while rather sparse and simplistic, actually worked well enough in favor of the movie. Don't go expecting a traditional zombie movie here, loaded with blood and gore.

The scene with the bunny can prove a bit overwhelming for some audience members, I suppose, as it was rather brutal.

"Håndtering Av Udøde" was a swing and a miss of a movie. It was a boring, slow paced movie that made little sense, and proven even less entertaining. This is hardly a movie that I would recommend you to waste your time, money and effort on. Nor is it a movie that will ever grace my screen a second time. When the movie came to an end, after a rather prolonged runtime, I have to say that I was left with an overwhelming sensation of 'what did I just sit through, and more importantly why did I endure it?'

It was as if director Thea Hvistendahl was going for a direction that favored artistic approach over entertainment value. I am sure that there is a particular avantgarde audience out there that will enjoy this movie. I just happened to not be a part of that particular target audience.

My rating of "Håndtering Av Udøde" lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.