Cinematography:
Patrick BlossierCast:
Frédéric Pierrot, Samir Guesmi, Guillaume Gouix, Anne Consigny, Clotilde Hesme, Céline Sallette, Pierre Perrier, Ana Girardot, Jérôme Kircher (more)VOD (1)
Seasons(2) / Episodes(16)
Plots(1)
French supernatural drama, where the inhabitants of a mountain village are confronted by the reappearance of a number of dead people. In an Alpine village dominated by a huge dam, a confused group of men, women and children begin to mysteriously appear. Not realising that they are in fact dead, having met their end years earlier in a variety of ways, the group set about trying to reclaim their past lives. But their arrival throws the small community into chaos as the affected families struggle to come to terms with what is happening. To make matters worse, history seems to be repeating itself, as, several years after a serial killer terrorised the small community, there is a spate of similarly gruesome murders. (Universal Pictures UK)
(more)Reviews (2)
Mysterious series with the premise of “small town in the mountains where weird things happen” have the misfortune that this is the premise of the best series of all time and they are doomed to lose against it. This of course also applies to The Returned, which never reaches the level of quality of Twin Peaks. Nevertheless, it’s still a very nice series with a touch of horror that’s worth its eight hours. It’s about several (dead) inhabitants of a French mountain village who just come back from the grave after different periods of time. They haven’t aged a day and don’t remember how they died. Naturally, their return comes with several problems… One of them, for instance, is a psycho-killer. It’s nicely intimate, sometimes chilling and also slightly scary. The first episode hooked me in and I watched all the eight episodes in two days. The biggest shortcoming is that from one episode to the next the series wants to be too mysterious, even though many of the motifs are very clear, and we don’t get many answers (for instance, the last scene of the first episode poses a question that’s never addressed later). That’s a pity, but thumbs up regardless. Fans of mysterious stories shouldn’t be disappointed.
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To describe it as a French "zombie" Twin Peaks is a cheap description that's a long way from the truth, but on the other hand, it does offer itself... Eight episodes about a town in the foothills where peaceful coexistence is disturbed by returning (un)dead household members who have not died of natural causes and who have somehow not been told that they are long since dead. As cheesy as it sounds, it works perfectly well thanks to the unique characterization of the characters (and their logical behavior) and very suitably chosen intimate stylization, and one would believe that if something like this ever happened, it would happen exactly like this. And despite the occasional lull in the storyline, it keeps you in constant tension precisely because you care about the characters, and especially because of the dense, disturbing atmosphere (strongly evoking Trier's Melancholia) massively doped with a musical undertones by Mogwai. Perhaps a warning to those who require all questions to be answered; it is similar to Twin Peaks also in the following respect. There are no clear answers here. Which is good - it would just lose its charm otherwise. I just don't know how, considering the season one finale (brilliant, by the way), they can maintain the civility on which it all stands for season two.
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