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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Jun 12, 2024

Hvistendahl treats the audience with respect, her and Lindqvist’s reworking of the latter’s source material respectful, intelligent, and overflowing in empathy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 9, 2024

After losing a loved one, you may long for one more chance to see and hug them. Be careful what you wish for. Thea Hvistendah’s debut feature is a meditative, mind-shattering experience that gets under your skin.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 8, 2024

After all, the grieving family in Pet Sematary went asking for trouble. Here, the trouble comes calling, and Handling the Undead answers with a bleak but compelling study of desperation meeting inhuman connection.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 7, 2024

The tone is not shock or terror but tragedy, and the story offers no easy answers, solutions or ways out for its characters.

Full Review | Jun 7, 2024

Composer Peter Raeburn’s beautifully sad soundtrack along with Pål Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography contribute to creating a tragic mood that’s hard to let go of after the film’s sad conclusion.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 6, 2024

The cooking comparison for Handling the Undead would be a sauce that’s broken, its elements having separated. There’s a genuine sense of lived-in sadness here, but this would-be elegy doesn't offer quite enough mesmeric insights to justify its somberness.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jun 6, 2024

Hvistendahl establishes herself as a filmmaker with a keen interest in the human condition and a remarkable visual eye.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 5, 2024

When all is said and done, it simply doesn't do enough as a study of human suffering or expansion of zombie canon to justify its own existence. It's simply an empty, lumbering husk.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2024

It’s one of the most effective horror films of the year, and if you’re of a certain persuasion it’s the kind of thing that will shake you to your core.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2024

No gore, no problem? Subdued horror film lacks a pulse, purpose.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 1, 2024

“Handling the Undead” also eschews any of the practical questions, but with a more humanist intent: to lean single-mindedly into its characters’ emotions — and also its eerie mythical resonance.

Full Review | May 31, 2024

Hvistendahl’s film is absorbing, even captivating at times. But it moves at a pace that can be charitably described as “measured.” (The uncharitable word is “sluggish.”)

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 31, 2024

Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead reimagines the typical zombie flick through a sedated meditation on what defines the living: having a body or possessing a soul?

Full Review | May 31, 2024

It's not a flesh-ripping horror flick — there are one or two mid-level jolts over the course of the picture's 97 minutes, but the fear merchants at Blumhouse or Atomic Monster would chuckle at both of them.

Full Review | May 31, 2024

Handling the Undead treats this well-worn subject of horror stories with a level of sincerity and severity that's novel and refreshing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 30, 2024

Feels kind of flat, and never really gets off the ground to deliver on its premise and genre.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 30, 2024