The recently dead return to life in They Came Back, but they are surprisingly uninterested in feasting on the living. Many of them are, naturally enough, elderly, and they seem content merely to go back to their former lives, but their return causes a myriad of complications. Robin Campillo, making his feature directorial debut, co-wrote the script to Laurent Cantet's Time Out, and his "zombie" movie quietly examines the individual and societal impact the dead have on the small French city -- just one of many similarly ...
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The recently dead return to life in They Came Back, but they are surprisingly uninterested in feasting on the living. Many of them are, naturally enough, elderly, and they seem content merely to go back to their former lives, but their return causes a myriad of complications. Robin Campillo, making his feature directorial debut, co-wrote the script to Laurent Cantet's Time Out, and his "zombie" movie quietly examines the individual and societal impact the dead have on the small French city -- just one of many similarly afflicted throughout the world -- to which they return. Isham (Djemel Barek) and Véronique (Marie Matheron) have their trepidations, but they're generally happy, at first, to see their little boy Sylvain (Saady Delas), and the town's elderly mayor (Victor Garrivier) welcomes home his wife, Martha (Catherine Samie). But Rachel (Géraldine Pailhas of 5x2), a government health official, cannot bring herself to visit her newly returned husband, Mathieu (Jonathan Zaccaï of Seaside), at the ad-hoc shelter where the government houses the "zombies" like refugees. Eventually, she relents, and Mathieu returns home, but the living find that their loved ones are not exactly as they remember them. Studies soon reveal that the dead suffer from a form of aphasia. They cannot create new memories, and they cannot be trusted to perform any but the most menial tasks. Perhaps sensing the discomfort they cause the living, the dead gather together at night, and seem to be formulating some kind of secret plan. They Came Back was selected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center for inclusion in the 2005 edition of New Directors/New Films. Josh Ralske, Rovi
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Géraldine Pailhas, Jonathan Zaccaï, Frédéric Pierrot, Victor Garrivier, Catherine Samie. Run time: 102 mins. Originally released: 2004. Language: French. Les Revenants \ They Came Back (DVD, 2005, Canadian) Audio: French (Subs: English) A welcome original entry into the vast canon of zombie films, THEY CAME BACK offers a humorous poke at the conventions of the genre. Set in a quiet French town, the local residents are in for a shock when the dead come crawling back to life. But they needn't fear, as these undead non-ghouls simply want to come home and resume their lives from whence they left off. As the issue begins to attract attention from outside the village, a huge problem evolves as no one can decide what to do with this convergence of the walking dead. Amusing at first, director Robin Campillo delicately allows a disturbing undercurrent to develop as the film progresses, resulting in a memorable movie with themes that echo the Brit zombie hit SHAUN OF THE DEAD.