A last-minute addition to the May calendar is a reunion between The Worst Person in the World stars Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie. Thea Hvistendahl’s zombie feature Handling the Undead, adapted by the director and John Ajvide Lindqvist based on the latter’s novel, premiered earlier this year at Sundance Film Festival and will now arrive from NEON starting May 31. Ahead of the release, the new trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “On a hot summer day in Oslo, the dead mysteriously awaken, and three families are thrown into chaos when their deceased loved ones come back to them. Who are they, and what do they want? A family is faced with the mother’s reawakening before they have even mourned her death after a car accident; an elderly woman gets the love of her life back the same day she has buried her; a grandfather rescues his grandchild from the gravesite in a desperate attempt to get his daughter out of her depression. Handling the Undead is a drama with elements of horror about three families, a story about grief and loss, but also about hope and understanding of what we can’t comprehend or control.”
Dan Mecca said in his review, “The first word that comes to mind when thinking of how to write about Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead is: dread. To expand: slow, ponderous dread. Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist (and based on his novel of the same name), this is a zombie movie in the tradition of the author’s own Let the Right One In. There are zombies here but, as with the vampires in the latter work, the focus is elsewhere, mostly. Its genre construct is meant to elevate a deeper kind of pain. In this incarnation, a series of sad people dealing with different variations of grief must contend with an unsettling new reality: those loved ones they’ve buried have come back to life.”
See the trailer below.
Handling the Undead opens on May 31.