If you’d been dead for ten years and found yourself freshly and unexpectedly resurrected, what’s the first thing you’d do? Look up that old lover? Do a naked victory lap round the town square? Seek revenge on the living? Or just go back to work?
Robert Campillo’s 2004 French drama THE RETURNED (LES REVENANTS) explores this issue when the recent dead inexplicably wander back into both their small home-town and the lives of their friends and family. If this scenario rings a funereal bell that’s no surprise; French supernatural television drama THE RETURNED (2012) is based on the 2004 film. And of course as any horror aficionado knows, zombie films aren’t just brains and gore – but often social commentary. Romero’s seminal classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) explores race, DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), consumerism, and British homage SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004) not only looks at growing up and becoming a man, but much like THE RETURNED, asks if the zombie apocalypse happened, what would we actually do with the dead, after the big clear up?
But if you’re hoping for bloody carnage, beware; Campillo’s shuffling stiffs exhibit few of the typical characteristics familiar from Hollywood – instead they have more in common with the Haitian tradition, or even ghosts. They’re mainly older and grey haired, carefully dressed and without a fleck of grave dirt. They move along together ponderously, their faces strangely bovine. They gather in herds and gaze into the distance. What do they want from us? Love? Perhaps some nice juicy brains? But here’s the rub; they don’t seem to want much of anything (definitely not brains).
The town council are equally bemused, and spend ages sitting round in boardrooms, having meetings about the zombie plague and discussing what to do. In the end they stick the dead in holding pens, or ship them back off home to their family. Most just go back to work. Yes, let’s say that again – most just go back to work. And strange as that sounds, if great Uncle Bert suddenly reappeared six years after he’d been planted, you’d probably want to get him out the house too. THE RETURNED would almost be Terry Gilliam-esque in its bureaucratic absurdity if not for Campillo’s slow-moving direction. But of course (you guessed it) we start to see a whole new sub-class of people: the recently-deceased-but-back class. Once scientists decide they can’t learn new behaviour, only copy, they get all the rubbish jobs no one else wants. Luckily the film is prevented from descending into heavy-handiness here by Campillo’s insistence on ambiguity in favour of any easy answers.
And that’s what THE RETURNED is about really: social relationships. If you’re looking for brains and gore you won’t find it here. Instead this is a film about society, how we deal with loss, but also how we move on (and it’s pretty hard to move on if your dead partner is back from the grave). That’s not to say there isn’t a pervading eeriness supported by shadowy composition and lighting as well as the vacant, abstracted performances by those who return. Much of this is connected to the mystery surrounding the dead – why they’re back. But THE RETURNED gives no neatly wrapped up answers; the dead can keep their secrets.
And sometimes it’s the living who creep you out the most. Why exactly is the doctor (Frédéric Pierrot) so interested in helping recently widowed Rachel (Géraldine Pailhas)? Any possibility of altruistic motivation is scuppered when we see him hiding in the bushes filming Rachel and her newly returned husband Mathieu (Jonathan Zaccaï) getting frisky on the sofa. Or what about the mother so freaked out by her young son Sylvain that she wishes he would “die” (again), or at least disappear? A growing sense of paranoia pervades the community until the dead find themselves monitored 24/7.
THE RETURNED raises many questions – certainly more than it answers. And while those may be very worthy, philosophical questions, the film shuffles and meanders round in circles (much like the walking cadavers), every now and then looking like it’s going to bolt off in another direction before, um…not. Creepy, but not horrific, THE RETURNED perhaps suggests the ultimate horror isn’t the dead are walking the earth, but that the living don’t actually want them back after all.
THE RETURNED is out on DVD and Blu-ray July 22. You can order it now via this handy link!
