A sweltering summer day, nine in the morning. Power’s glitching. To the backdrop of a piercing buzzing sound, people are afflicted with sudden headaches.  And soon Oslo is enveloped in an electric field. After the Event the dead return one after another, trying to find their place alongside their living loved ones. A single mother is held back from a suicide attempt by her father – he has brought her dead son with him. A woman has bid farewell to her love at her funeral – to find her home alive in the evening. A family dejection cycle is interrupted by the return of the mother. Did the dead have to wake?

This accidentally existential fantasy spins psychological tension, challenging the living with a provocative question: is mourning selfish? The feature debut of the Norwegian director Hvistendahl is an emotionally delicate watercolour of zombie flicks and auteur film, its canvas – the award-winning novel by Swede John Ajvide Lindqvist. In this winner of the Award for Original Music at Sundance, the city of Oslo takes on a meditative shape of the Zone, bogging down memories and unfulfilled yearning, the undead and their mourners. Among them – the so-called Scandinavian Annie Hall Renate Reinsve and Norwegian Anders Danielsen Lie from the dramedy The Worst Person in the World (2021).