It’s not about a descent into apocalypse, or the loathsome human tendency to eat ourselves. Instead, it’s a slow story about the blank, numb emptiness of grief.

| Jan 5, 2025

Handling the Undead won’t deliver the shocks and dyed-red corn syrup you may expect. But for an art film with more on its mind than gruesome slaughter, it delivers.

| Oct 27, 2024

The downbeat tone means that this isn't an easy film to watch, and it holds its nerve by never offering much hope.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 17, 2024

An uneasy and somber atmospheric zombie tale on grief.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 23, 2024

Slow at times but a real game-changer in the genre. You don't normally associate a zombie film being thought-provoking and an emotional ride.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 17, 2024

It subverts the conception of 'zombie movies' and, despite the distance with which the characters are described, carries enormous emotionality. The Hvistendahl-Lindqvist duo delves into the feeling of loss with great sensitivity. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 6, 2024

While it might lack the jump scares and body count of a typical zombie film, Handling the Undead has a beating heart that delivers a surprisingly tender story …

| Original Score: 14/20 | Aug 3, 2024

Thea Hvistendahl’s feature length debut is a tender dance with the material at hand. She is unafraid to make space for the parts of death and life that make us angry or sad or disgusted, even as she paints them with a tender hand.

| Aug 1, 2024

Handling the Undead is certainly an eerie and bleak film, taking the macabre subject matter of the undead and highlighting the intrinsic grief... However, at a certain point, glaring problems mean the film never grabs you as it should.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2024

It's far less about action-packed sequences and tons of blood and far more about the emotional response to a zombie apocalypse.

Full Review | Jul 11, 2024

It feels like I sat down at my favorite restaurant, ordered my favorite meal, and then discovered a new chef was in the kitchen. It’s familiar, but it’s not quite right.

| Jun 27, 2024

One can be grateful for not having to stare at gory slaughter and still wish there were something here to break the suffocating trance of sadness.

| Original Score: C | Jun 27, 2024

... As horrifying as it is beautiful, that, without moving away from drama, feeds on horror films to become a forceful exploration of grief and guilt. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 24, 2024

Emotionally devastating, ‘Handling the Undead’ knows how to disturb to qualify as a horror story, but it is also deeply emotional and ultimately humanistic... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 21, 2024

Sets us up to predict the kind of tropey zombie horror we might be about to experience, but director Thea Hvistendahl takes us elsewhere

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 19, 2024

Thea Hvistendahl makes her feature film debut with a terrifyingly captivating film in which loved ones return from the dead to haunt us. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 18, 2024

The peculiar circumstances that consume its grief-stricken characters leave an underwhelming and distant film in its wake, as Handling The Undead grapples raw emotions with cold, dead hands.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 17, 2024

Maybe that’s the more fruitful lesson of Handling the Undead: That art is more than sleepwalking in a zombified fog; real art shakes you out of your slumber.

| Original Score: 60/100 | Jun 14, 2024

For now, Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead is a revival of the zombie genre. The Scandinavian drama is a one-of-a-kind film that brings a spellbinding and mesmerising story of a never-ending nightmare.

| Jun 12, 2024

Handling the Undead plays like Baby’s First Arthouse Horror, though that isn’t the jab it may read like; there’s value, in an MCU-less start-of-summer period, to provide curious audiences with a gateway to other slower-moving thrillers like this one.

| Jun 12, 2024