The token
** ‘Rest in peace’. Zombie drama, Norway-Sweden, 2024, 97 min. Address: Thea Hvistendahl. Script: T. Hvistendahl, John Ajvide Lindqvist. Photography: Pål Ulvik Rokseth. Music: Peter Raeburn. Interpreters: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Bahar Pars, Bjørn Sundquist, Bente Børsum.
From Norway, with a script by the novelist as well John Ajvide Lindqvistknown by titles such as Let me in and Border, Rest in peace seeks to rewrite the story zombie with a patina of existential transcendence and certain author’s marks in a merger that does not end up benefiting either one model or the other.
Until its first half, by far the best, the debutant Thea Hvistendahl is cooking on fire slow the foreboding atmosphere of a cataclysm that brings out (literally) three members of as many families, unrelated to each other, from their graves, recently deceased under unknown circumstances. Thus, a child, an adult woman, wife and mother, and an elderly woman they return from the world of the dead in apparent calm, inevitably marked by traffic and in a semi-conscious state that does not exactly announce a happy rebirth.
That’s when the obviousness and latex they impose themselves on the silent mystery and when Rest in peace teaches without ambiguity the cards of the genre and the escalation towards a terror that is intended to be metaphysical but that in the end ends up becoming explicit and even obscene. By then the film has already abandoned the possible questions about vital extensions, grief or guilt to travel in three unequal scenarios through the zombie universe and the amplified emotions through one of those stagings that aspire to the sublime and remain a collection of tics. The rather blurred and wasted contest of the two stars of the latest Norwegian cinema, Anders Danielsen Lie and Renate Reinsvewhom we saw together in better performances in The worst person in the worldit also seems like a hook more than a necessity.
