The Returned (French supernatural drama on Channel 4)

starting this and hoping it's better than TOTL. had high hopes for this sundance stuff!

currently being driven crazy about this guy cause he looks like 99% the same as some non-french actor i can't remember

http://fr.web.img2.acsta.net/r_640_600/b_1_d6d6d6/medias/nmedia/18/92/60/65/20371186.jpg

i might just be thinking of david costabile but i swear there's a closer match

robert wuhl?

john malkovich?

He looks like a warped version of Tom Hanks.

nearly 3 in and i'm disappointed, this is like half a good show and half a CW drama that isn't interesting

i watched the movie shortly after it came out on DVD, i don't remember much from it except that it was (also) disappointing and possibly a bit bigoted in its precious immigration allegory (if that's what it was going for -- could never really know). apparently this is the second time in a row i've hyped myself up for a well-tempered-and-possibly-a-little-eerie story abt dead people coming back and attempting to reintegrate only to be met with this hodge-podge of mystery shit and CREEPY CHILDREN ugh. i blame nearly everything i've ever read about either the movie or show which described it as the former

but seriously even with mogwai there are so many shots that feel like they came out of secret life of the american teenager

The high point of the season is in the middle imo, so it will get better for you before it gets worse.

tbh if you don't like it after three episodes, I don't see how the rest of it would change your mind

yeah that's what i'm thinking too but i'll probably watch the rest anyway

the parts that i think are really good are mostly just the three actual cases of returned people. esp the twins. this is why i think this idea keeps getting rehashed (a novel! a tv adaptation of the novel! an english adaptation of the tv adaptation of the novel!) even though the original film wasn't a big deal and wasn't any good -- the simple idea of dead people coming back and trying to reintegrate into their families and into society offers a ton of possibilities for stories and character dynamics that haven't really been explored. it's almost easy to make this shit interesting. but every time they do it they just have to add all this silly pointless shit that doesn't belong and suddenly i'm having LOST flashbacks

the simple idea of dead people coming back and trying to reintegrate into their families and into society offers a ton of possibilities for stories and character dynamics that haven't really been explored.

agreed. and i hate how the show boils down into classy horror tropes, or even exposes (?) how the returned returned to life. i was more interested in the domestic complexities of, what happens when your dead sister comes back to life?

kid's pee coming out of closet
now it's blood

^ this incredible shot really deserved its 90-second slow pan

just finished this, totally in love with it. almost every episode was so pitch-perfect. loved the pacing, the feeling of gradual convergence as all these storylines came together, loved how the finale answered some questions but raised even more.

might argue for camille as creepier than victor. victor played into a lot of classic creepy-child tropes but he's more vulnerable than malevolent, and even if he has this power to make people...see things that might result in them killing themselves, i don't think he quite has a handle on it - see his conversation with mme costa, his "i didn't mean to do it" re: chloé. i don't think camille is malevolent either but she's like the midpoint between simon (very human in his emotional demeanour, single-mindedness, need to pick up where he left off) and victor (preternaturally "creepy") in that she acts completely normally, exactly like you'd expect a teenage girl to, at times, but at others just seems that little bit too poised. the camille/léna plot was certainly the best of that season, and i loved how it didn't end in confrontation but reconciliation and a partnership you feel is now much stronger.

anyone feel like undead simon's intensity and refusal to take no for an answer might reflect something dysfunctional in that relationship when he was alive? adèle seems to have a need for codependency that's evident in her relationship with thomas as well.

thomas is a cunt and i hope he gets a nasty comeuppance soon. controlling, selfish, stupid. the way he sold everyone but his own precious family out in the last episode, ugh. funny that he seems to be analogous to rick in the walking dead. all cops are bastards.

mme costa's over-it snark is much appreciated and i hope to see more of it in the next series. she seems to know what's up but is generally uninterested in telling people.

think it was abundantly clear from the minute julie hopefully raised the possibility that she was dead that she totally isn't. lucy otoh...dead already when she first arrived? or really just a sexual clairvoyant?

anyone feel like undead simon's intensity and refusal to take no for an answer might reflect something dysfunctional in that relationship when he was alive?

this is certainly what i was thinking

currently being driven crazy about this guy cause he looks like 99% the same as some non-french actor i can't remember

Not sure if this is what you were thinking, but my first instinct was "Wait, Fred Armisen's in this?"

http://funnyandspicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Front-Desk-With-Fred-Armisen-Vow-of-Silence-300x255.jpg

I enjoyed the series pretty much all the way through, though I agree with the consensus disappointment at the way it broadened into something more genre predictable in the last few episodes. Like a lot of these weird-tale series, it keeps piling on elements that don't necessarily seem connected or well-thought-out -- the twins' telepathic bond, the creeping skin disease, the way Julie, Laure and Victor/Louis are unable to actually drive out of town ... starts to feel like whatever supernatural trope serves the needs of the immediate plot point. Still, great atmospherics, interesting approach to the whole idea of the undead.

On the lighting, I thought this was interesting, from the Guardian (apologies if it's mentioned upthread):

Based on a 2004 film of the same name, Les Revenants was given its distinctive feel partly by the director's decision only to film between 4pm and 9pm – "Fabrice always wanted it to be dusk", said Thiam

My wife and I finished watching this yesterday. I really wanted to like it, and the first couple of episodes were moderately intriguing, but the payoff was a flabby script, bad acting, editing a two-hour movie into an eight-hour endurance test, and finally a bunch of questions that were rendered too boring to bother answering. The Alps were pretty, though.

yeah i thought this started off so well but we never even watched the 10th episode, it had become pretty clear they didn't know what they were doing

It tails off very badly, and never really fulfills the promise of those first episodes. But those first episodes are excellent.

It is far from flawless but I still enjoyed the full series myself. It is still remarkably better than a hell of a lot of series from last year so I forgive it's faults.

OH I'M SO GLAD THIS THREAD POPPED BACK UP. I put some cranky comments on the Netflix one but this is much better.

Are you talking about the terrible ABC series Resurrection? I think that is from a different source but it is fucking appalling.

I don't think Resurrection is so terrible. It's just a different thing altogether.

I couldn't take that ridiculous concept that the returned kid shows up in some Chinese province. They just buried him too deep durr! Some really rubbish sub X-Files type shit.

The most recent episode revealed all the "resurrected" are showing up at some particular degree of longitude/latitude from Arcadia, though...very Lost-y, but not random.

Everyone is assuming that this show is going to a really conventional and boring place based on what they've seen in other shows but we don't actually know what Season 2 is going to be like at all.

I'm not assuming that.

Yeah I know, you just don't particularly like it, which is a different thing. What I'm getting at is the "this started off really well but I have misapprehensions about the direction suggested by the final episode" when we don't actually know if it's going to go in that direction.

Also people are really burned by Lost, every time a new show appears that layers loads of mysteries on top of one another, the assumption now is that the writers don't have a clue how to resolve them. Admittedly that's often vindicated but I have enough faith in this case.

Here it is: http://tvline.com/2014/04/29/ae-the-returned-adaptation/

Carlton Cuse, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

FFS why bother? Especially after all the other pointless remakes that are universally unloved.

definitely don't get the "bad acting" complaints, and i think it's way too soon to say for certain whether the writers don't know what they're doing - they haven't even tried to give us "answers" and have never even emphasised that as a priority

ahaha cuse is perfect

Just wanna say I really liked this show beginning to end. This is especially exciting to me because I don't think lex and I have ever liked the same thing before.

I really liked the early parts of this (establishing eerie premise), was bored by central parts of it (where is it going? + v humourless, sense of stasis), LOVED the final stages (ie didn't think it tailed off at all - vicious moral decisions, suggestion of portcullis coming down between different decisions made by different people).

hope the next series is a substantial progression from the final events of S1, rather than a replay of uncertainty.

watched the first episode of this and it was promising, but am really wary that the reason its gotten so much good press is that its 'classy' and 'subtle' (read: meandering), which arent bad things to be, but those seem to be part of their own set of boxset tv cliches now. my fear is that its going to be directionless and atmospheric at the expense of real drama or anything of much note happening. im all for subtlety, just not ponderously so.

obviously, i hope im really wrong.

The overall plot may not be up to scratch (imo, others will disagree) but the human drama and characterisation are compelling throughout (imo etc).

Take a shot every time someone says 'lake poob'.

About time. The teaser trailer for series 2.

https://youtu.be/NRABgDs-VD0

Wish I'd re-watched season one before the new episode

has it begun again?

It aired last night I presume, it has been on the torrentz for 15 hours.

Was first aired on Friday, repeated last night. It's on e4 or more4 or one of those rather than a channel anyone watches.

Will be on whatever ch4 are calling their iPlayer this week.

Debating whether I remember enough from last season to take the plunge on S2

Not entirely sure I'm going to bother with S2 - I liked how the first started a great deal, but it had sort of mostly turned into nonsense by the end of the season.

agreed. the initial episodes were wonderful but i grew less enamoured the more it took shape and became less about the impact of these people coming back from the dead and more scary zombie show

Judging by the first episode of S2, it's going to continue to be about character I think. Having said that I found the opener a bit ponderous, too many threads quite widely scattered.

Where were Camille and Lucy and the others meant to be, by the way? In another town?

watched the first three eps of the new series tonight, i thought it was great. relentlessly bleak. tho it has a few problems as per matt's question - i also wondered where the characters are, and like basic things like the military not believing the story about the returned - i feel like they're kind of writing around huge holes in the plot that they don't want to reveal yet or haven't got an answer for, but they are doing so quite deftly, for now.

watched the s2 premiere and found it insanely boring tbh

Yeah the premier was a drag but it's got going very nicely by episode three - a couple of real WTF moments in that most recent one. Problem is that unless they establish that some people can actually just die and never come back, there's not much of a sense of jeopardy right now.

They have made the classic mistake of spreading the cast out too thinly, a couple of characters seemed to have just vanished from the screen as well, although I'd forgotten that the police had mysteriously disappeared in the season finale. The stuff about Vincent's murder is pretty compelling - I like the idea of using the undead as an opportunity to shine light on dark incidents in a town's history.

Is there a Vincent? I'm not correcting you, I just can't remember who that is. I agree that all the backstory stuff is great. Though I have occasionally thought that quite a lot of people have died in this town, especially young people. Wouldn't most revenants just be octogenarians pottering around?

I'd completely forgotten who that Madame whatever was - not much point to her - and like you I had to read Wikipedia to get an idea of what happened at the very end of season 1.

The whole thing looks incredible, there aren't many shows I've seen with such beautiful shots.

I guess the big question now is why some of them are those ashen-faced zombies and some seem to know they are revenants and are sad about this.

Sorry I meant Victor, not Vincent.

ah cool - i genuinely wasn't sure if there was a character called vincent or not!