Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: HANDLING THE UNDEAD [Sundance Film Festival 2024 - Park City, Utah]
"Handling The Undead" [World Dramatic Competition] is not so much about the dead as about the living. Of course, the concept is based on the dead coming back to life but the craft in this story is showing what the living are willing to do or at least give creedemce to that concept of what dependencies we put on ourselves when someone is gone. The film follows three stories of note. One of a mother dying, one of a close family member coming back and one of a child who is lost too soon. The McGuffin of the story rests in an unexplained power surge and brown-out which brings these people is a small way back to life. Now whether this idea or perspective is interlaced or influenced by mythology or perhaps the concept of the rapture is unknown. It is simply a starting point. A bereft grandfather digs up his grandson from the grave when he is knocked out by a power surge and hears a sound. The dead are not interactive. They are mostly inert not sure of their surroundings, weak and frail, except at certain points.
When a young man sees his mother reanimate after she had died on the operating table, he is incredulous but figures there should be some practical explanation. He can't explain it to his wife and in fact buys his son a rabbit as a reference of life and hope moving on. This leads to an expected though still vivid interaction in the hospital with his undead mother and said animal. The path of the resurrected child is a little more myesterious and dynamic with the mother and the grandfather shepherding the boy away when the police want to question them.
The dynamic thing that the film does is not try to explain why but more just how people react. The woman with her close friend just seems to try to clean her up and put makeup on her, not questioning the aspect of why. Another textured scene involves these two women dancing with the gray lifeless skin versus that which is still alive creates a contrast, even as the dead body seems to lean into the other woman. The eyes of all the dead are muddy so their path is clear but not to those on screen. The eventual comeuppance is expected but not done overtly and overwroughtly. It simply has to do with moving on, which is very difficult for those who have not yet reconciled what that person and that life meant to them. Granted director Thea Hvistendahl creates an element of dread but not one so much as horror as one of inevitability while still creating a cinematic style that lulls the viewer until the final shot. B+
By Tim Wassberg
