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‘Handling the Undead’ Review: A Zombie Drama With a Beating Heart Under Rotting Flesh
The living dead are back again in Thea Hvistendahl's surprisingly delicate 'Handling the Undead,' starring Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie.
These contradictions are features, not bugs: Full of frail, mortal feeling and overcast last-days imagery, “Handling the Undead” lingers coolly in the bones longer than many zombie films that offer more immediate, grisly gratification. Hvistendahl treats all these domestic vignettes with an equal sense of everyday pathos, regardless of their morbidly fantastical circumstances — though a pained montage of unreturned acts of love, scored to Nina Simone’s tremulous interpretation of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” is a rare lapse into emotional overstatement. Equally active in its maintenance are the watchful, stalking presence of Rokseth’s camera, the dusty carpeting and lived-in decay of Linda Janson’s production design and, most gnawingly of all, the shrilly anguished strings and discordant piano of Peter Raeburn’s excellent score.
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