Good Or Shit: The Returned

In a quiet little French alpine town, a mother stands in her daughter's bedroom. Her daughter, Camille, is dead. As well as several other children when their bus went off the side of a mountain three years earlier. A photograph of Camille stands in a place of honour in the room, a lit candle sits next to it. And then, Camille comes home.

This is one of the first scenes in French television drama/zombie-thriller Les Revenants, the English subtitled version of which has just aired in the UK titled The Returned. As the dam the town lies beside threatens to break and the electricity flickers until the whole place lies in darkness, a dead butterfly encased in a frame, twitches, flutters, and breaks out of the glass – the first of several creatures to cross from the underworld and return to our own.

Camille's mother lingers in her dead daughter's room until she hears the front door open. Thinking it's Camille's sister, she makes her way downstairs, but the voice that casually calls out to her is one she never thought she would ever hear again. Slowly, apprehensively, she goes to the kitchen. And there, eating a salami sandwich, sits Camille, not a scratch on her, wearing the same clothes she'd been wearing the day she died, apologising for getting home so late, claiming that she inexplicably woke up in the woods, that she can't remember what happened … and that she is so hungry.

I am, for want of a better phrase, a scaredy cat. I endured an intense panic attack throughout Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which I watched as an adult, in the 2000s, with all the lights on, surrounded by people who thought the film was funny. After watching the American version of The Ring, I slept in my mum's bed for a month – I was 22. I am currently enjoying an X-Files resurrection, but after an episode my boyfriend has to come to the bathroom with me and stand outside the door while I pee. I check behind doors and under beds and I always push shower curtains back. My friends think my fear is hilarious. They turn lights off and walk toward me in a bent, stilted manner, like a Japanese girl with hair over her face and the only way I can stop myself from puking in terror is to launch myself at them, violently pummelling them with my fists while shrieking for them to stop. I never find any of this shit funny. Never. 

I have a vivid imagination. And it's imagination that draws me to The Returned but for a different reason because, even though Camille is dead and so hungry, it's her mother's sheer relief, those eyes welling at the site before her, the realisation of something intensely yearned for that really stops my heart. Someone she loved and lost has come back. The child isn't rotten and trying to eat her face off, entirely lost to reason, and emotion, it's just her beautiful young daughter come back to her. It's wish fulfilment.  And as a viewer who has wished that very wish, it is the portrayal of the possibility of its fulfilment that makes these moments in The Returned as sublime as they are so very sad.

Camille is not alone. There are others. And each of the characters – dead and alive – grapples with a host of intense emotions as they are reunited with loved ones in this small, isolated town where mystery shrouds as thick as the fog does.

This is not all kisses and cuddles. Everyone is afraid. Perhaps if they were crazy ghouls you would know what to do. But resurrection of the Jesus type? People you love, unchanged, still wanting to marry you, to be your child, your brother, your sister, your parent, your friend?

The finishing touch, the, as the French might say, pièce de résistance, is Mogwai's soundtrack – Les Revenants.

From opening track Hungry Face, with its darkly innocent piano keys, to Wizard Motor's funeral-like organ, slow drums and exulted electric guitar riffs, this album is haunting, melancholy, mysterious, at times light and sweet, at others dark and full of anguish. Much like the narrative it builds toward something but as the storm brews, it never quite smashes violently against the cliffs and the result is unsettling. It's what you want to have playing on a journey across the river Styx.

Just because I can watch this show doesn't mean it isn't creepy. There were nights I went to bed and had to stop myself from thinking about it. But this isn't a gore-fest filled with mindless monsters and heroic characters with just enough development to carry off their one-liners before they blow some heads apart. There is enough murder, enough sinister goings on to make you squeeze the arm of the person sitting next to you. But this is an emotional, character-driven affair. And there are no answers. Not for the viewers and not for the characters. Just endless disquieting mystery and one lingering question, as sorrowful as it is discomforting – what if those we have lost returned…