If you’ve not yet seen The Returned — or Les Revenants, as it’s called in its native France — you’ve probably heard it billed as a “zombie show,” a subtler, more European version of The Walking Dead. Though this is technically correct, The Returned doesn’t deal in flesh-eating monsters or jump scares or weekly close-ups of innards spilled on concrete. What makes The Returned so powerful, and so profoundly unsettling, is that its zombies essentially look and act just like its humans do — and its mysteries and approach to horror look and act nothing like those we’re used to.
Season one (which you can still watch on Netflix if you missed it; it’s only eight hours long) kicked off with one of the most stunningly original and deeply disturbing episodes of television I’ve ever seen: In a small French village, a bus is winding down a mountain road, carrying a group of young schoolchildren, including a redhead named Camille (Yara Pilartz) who’s lost in thought as she stares at the staggering cliffs. Suddenly and without warning, the bus veers off the road and tumbles into the abyss, killing all its passengers. Moments later, the show cuts to present day, and we see the same young girl stumbling down a mountain road, confused and terrified, racing through the darkness to find her way home. Yep, somehow, Camille’s returned from the dead, looking just as she did when she left the house the morning she died.
Much of the rest of the pilot unfolds inside Camille’s home once she reaches her equally confused and terrified family — her mother Claire (Anne Consigny), her father Jérôme (Frédéric Pierrot), and her twin sister Lena, who’s aged four years. (She’s played by Jenna Thiam, who happens to have the most gorgeous mane of hair I’ve ever seen on television; it’s genuinely upsetting to behold.) Mom and Dad are happy, if not flabbergasted, to see her, but Lena, who’s still anguished by her death, can hardly look at her.
While slowly, masterfully advancing and fleshing out the plot, each subsequent episode similarly zoomed in on one of the town’s recent “revenants” as they alternately endeared themselves to and began to spar with the living: Simon (Pierre Perrier), who died the same day he found out his fiancée Adèle (Clotilde Hesme) was pregnant with his child, and is back to reclaim his daughter Chloe (Brune Martin) from her pissed-off police-chief stepdad (Samir Guesmi); Victor (Swann Nambotin), a somber kid with strange powers who died long ago and has been possibly roaming the town, searching for a surrogate mother, ever since (he soon finds one in Céline Sallette’s troubled Julie); Brothers Serge (Guillaume Gouix) and Toni (Grégory Gadebois), only one of whom is a revenant but who both harbor a terrible secret; and the eccentric, maybe-psychic Lucy (Ana Girardot), who claims she can commune with the dead while having sex and dresses stupidly well (like, where the party at, Lucy?).
Season one concluded with “La Horde,” in which things came to a dramatic head between the living villagers and the revenants at the Helping Hand — a sort of de facto refugee camp where a questionably-motivated man named Pierre (Jean-François Sivadier) had been sheltering families blessed (or cursed, really) with a resurrected member. A group of revenants led by Lucy — resplendent in a hip skater dress and jean jacket despite having been living in the goddamn woods for weeks — showed up at the Helping Hand’s doorstep, demanded that all of the remaining undead join them for some unspecified mission. After negotiating a few trades, adopting a few living members who couldn’t bear to part with their brethren, and potentially murdering an entire police squad, the revenants disappeared into the inky night, promising to return to collect the zombie baby of the newly pregnant Adele (who, in many moments of weakness, slept with the apparently still-virile zombie Simon). Got it? Good.
Season two picks up six months later. Sh*t has gone down in our little French town, including, but not limited to, a massive flood that destroyed half the village the same night the horde showed up. (The Leek Poob is no more!) Adele is about to give birth to her baby, and she’s very unhappy about it. Jérôme and Lena are miserable as well, barely speaking to one another, with the former rocking a new Mandy Patinkin beard and falling asleep on construction jobs and the latter visiting the police station on a daily basis to see if there’s any news about her sister and the rest of the revenants. But there’s not — in fact, it’s revealed that most of the town doesn’t believe Lena, Adele, or Jérôme about the revenants, having never seen them in the flesh, so to speak, and refusing to consider the possibility that the world doesn’t work like they thought it did. The only person who seems to have a vague sense of what’s going on — but won’t reveal himself as such — is Berg (Laurent Lucas), a newcomer who’s arrived to figure out why the town flooded for the second time in a few dozen years.
But there they are, the revenants, living across the lake in a kind of commune, with Lucy and Simon leading the charge. They seem to be preparing for some kind of unholy war: Lucy spends her nights searching the woods, which are full of new and completely disoriented revenants (and some kind of terrifying albino thing) that she’s hoping to collect for her mysterious cause. Meanwhile, Simon’s swimming back and forth from the land of the living to check on Adele’s progress and commune with little Chloe, who is going to need so much f*cking therapy. Claire and Camille are at each other’s throats, arguing over whether to tell Camille’s newly returned classmate that she is, in fact, dead. Victor and Julie are the picture of domestic bliss, with Victor doodling away as usual (real talk, though: if he’s been undead for so long, wouldn’t he be a better artist?) until another fresh revenant arrives and threatens to burst their carefully constructed bubble. And all of the above aren’t just hiding from the humans in their lakeside kibbutz — they’re hiding from something else, a group of creatures seemingly more sinister and less willing to compromise.
Though season two of The Returned abandons the character-centric structure, it holds onto its ineffable magic. Like Frankenstein’s monster, The Returned is the sum of its parts. Much of its tingly terror can be attributed to its soundtrack — eerie, feather-light sounds from the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai that gently score scenes only when necessary. The cinematography is lush and beautiful, all sharp contrasts, ominous shadows, moonlit forests, and jet-black lakes. The tone is quiet and observational, favoring subtle shifts in atmosphere over dialogue. The pacing is deliberately slow, like the plodding but purposeful steps of George Romero’s zombies. And, of course, the acting and the writing are as mind-blowingly good as ever: the living and the dead both visibly aching for one another, for the way things used to be, for some kind of understanding; the story a finely-wrought examination of grief, death, loss, and the cruel mysteries of the universe. Combined, these things create a pervading mood that’s both stomach-churningly creepy and beautiful, dreamy and very much grounded in reality.
A large part of what makes The Returned so compelling is that it unfolds like fairytales used to before they were Disney-fied, imagining what might really happen if we were granted our deepest wish. In our darkest moments, we’ve all prayed that a departed loved one might come back to life, that we’d been wrong about the circumstances of their death, that they’d walk in the door and assure us that it’s all been a big misunderstanding. But The Returned pokes at that desire, asks us to really consider its implications, and exposes its dark underbelly.
Last year, A&E tried to remake The Returned with Mary Elizabeth Winstead and a bunch of other people who are not French. It was canceled after a season because of poor ratings, and because it was missing something. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what that something was —Mogwai? Comfort with ambiguity? Lena’s mass of amazing hair? — but it was almost universally agreed upon that the series couldn’t match its predecessor, that most of the magic was lost in translation. Maybe it’s just that second comings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. So far, however, the original version’s second season has proved there’s still life after undeath.