Fabrice Gobert’s series about the dead walking home to a French mountain town has almost no scares and a great deal of dread. The first eight episodes are as fine as television of this kind gets; the second run, three years later, is not.
The Returned is a series about the dead coming home, and Fabrice Gobert, who created it and directed it, has made the sensible decision to treat that as a family problem rather than a horror one. Nobody shambles. Nobody is bitten. The dead of a small French mountain town walk back in, unaged and hungry, and sit down at the table, and the living have to decide what to do with them. The first season, eight episodes of around 55 minutes, is the best thing of its kind we have seen on television; the second, three years later, is not.
Camille (Yara Pilartz) is the first to return. She died a schoolgirl and comes back one, with no idea any time has passed. Her mother Claire (Anne Consigny) has kept the bedroom as it was; her father Jérôme (Frédéric Pierrot) has left; her sister Lena (Jenna Thiam) has grown into someone Camille does not recognise. The scene that got us is a plain one. Camille stands at the open fridge eating cold food, and Claire watches her from the doorway, unable to move. We were frightened, and then we realised the fright was Claire’s and it was mostly joy, and that was worse. Consigny plays the whole run on that line, a woman who has been given exactly what she prayed for and knows enough to be afraid of it.
The town looks like a place that has already lost most of its people. The light is blue-grey at all hours and the streets are half-empty. Gobert shoots the estate, the bar and the hospital from a slight distance, so that the returned look ordinary and the ordinary looks strange. Mogwai’s score does a great deal of the work. It is mostly guitar and organ played slowly, with a pulse underneath that keeps starting and stopping, and it sits so low in the mix that you are often unaware it has been running until it lifts.
The other strands are handled with the same patience. Simon (Pierre Perrier) knocks on the door of Adèle (Clotilde Hesme), who long ago made a life without him, one that now includes Thomas (Samir Guesmi); Hesme plays a woman watching years of recovery come undone. Julie (Céline Sallette), who lives alone with her door bolted, finds she is no longer alone, and Sallette makes her kindness look like a risk. Then Serge (Guillaume Gouix) walks into the kitchen of his brother Toni (Grégory Gadebois), and Toni’s face tells us this is a different kind of homecoming. Fabien Adda’s scripts let these stories run in parallel for episodes before they touch, and the touching is done with a look or a photograph rather than a speech.
Not all of it holds. Pierre (Jean-François Sivadier), who takes a religious interest in the returned, is the one character who seems to have arrived from a more talkative programme. Laure (Alix Poisson) is asked to carry more plot than the writing gives her. And the series is better at asking its question than answering it; by the sixth episode the mysteries have piled up and we suspected nobody knew quite where this was going. The last episode of the first run is a good ending that is also plainly a pause. Season 2, in 2015, tries to explain, and explanation is not what this material wants. It is watchable, but the dread thins into procedure.
Gobert took the idea from Robin Campillo’s 2004 film of the same name, which treated the returned as a civic matter. The series narrows it to a handful of families and is the better for it. Set against the zombie television of the same years, all sprinting and shooting, it is almost defiantly quiet. The dead here want dinner and their old bedrooms, and the horror is that they can have them.
Watch the first season over a few nights rather than one; it rewards a sleep between episodes. Watch it with subtitles rather than dubbed; the performances are in the pauses. And treat the second season as a separate, lesser thing, and stop when you find yourself wanting a diagram.
