Les Revenants

Les Revenants is the best thing ever made about bereavement and it achieves that by refusing almost everything the premise invites.

The returned are not zombies, not ghosts and not monsters. Camille Séguret walks down a mountain road and into her parents' kitchen four years after a coach crash killed her and most of her class, and she is fifteen and hungry and annoyed that nobody will tell her what is going on. Simon turns up at the church where his fiancée is about to marry somebody else, ten years after he died on their wedding day. They do not decay, they do not remember dying, they eat enormously, and they are exactly who they were — which is the cruelty, because everybody else has spent years becoming somebody who could live without them.

Gobert shoots it with total patience: long takes, flat Alpine light, a village that is mostly empty, and almost no score except Mogwai's, which is one of the great pieces of television music — droning, patient, melancholy, and used sparingly enough that it means something when it arrives.

Camille and Léna are the series

Camille is fifteen forever and her twin sister Léna is nineteen, and the show understands immediately what that does. Léna has four years of grief, guilt, a scar she did not have, a boyfriend who was Camille's, and a sister who has not aged a day and wants her life back. Yara Pilartz and Jenna Thiam play it as a genuine sibling relationship with a horror situation on top rather than the reverse, and the family's slow disintegration — a mother who has moved on, a father who never did, a church group forming around the returned — is written with no villains in it.

Where season two loses it

Season one is close to perfect and season two is not. Gobert expands the mythology, introduces a larger population of the returned, adds a community and a timeline that the first season deliberately withheld, and starts answering questions. The answers are not as good as the questions, the pacing becomes uneven, and several of season one's best ambiguities are resolved into something smaller. The series was not renewed, which means the back half of its own expansion goes unused.

Where it is difficult

At 012 on pace this is among the slowest things we hold and the slowness is the method. Subtitles, two seasons, and a show that will spend ten minutes on a woman cooking too much food for a daughter who died. There is also an American remake, which is not worth your time.

For the same small community and the same unresolved metaphysics, Midnight Mass; for the same grief that will not accept the outcome, Pet Sematary; for the same unhurried Alpine and village dread, The Wicker Man.

The short answer: the series' explanation, when it finally comes, is Victor. Victor — the small mute boy who died in the 1970s and who has been attached to Julie — is the cause: terrified of being left alone when the man who had been hiding him collapsed, he wished him back, and brought the village's other dead with him. He has been one of the returned himself for thirty-five years, which recasts everything about him. The reservoir, which has been dropping all series, uncovers the old church of the village the dam drowned, and the connection between the flooded settlement and the returned is made without being spelled out. The final episode is about letting go rather than winning. Camille is shot at by Frédéric; Claire shoots him; Jérôme drives Camille away and the road itself gives out, turning to dirt and then to nothing, and the Ségurets are left in the woods with Camille no longer breathing. They accept it, which is the series' whole argument — the dead can come back and it still has to end. The returned leave. And then the last beat undercuts the relief: Adèle and Simon's infant son is the same as Victor, Lucy leaves the baby on a doorstep, and Victor hears it cry and looks frightened. The series was cancelled after that, so nothing beyond it exists.

Why do the dead come back in Les Revenants?

Because Victor wanted someone to stay. Season two establishes that he is the origin: already one of the returned himself, hidden for thirty-five years, he was faced with losing the only person who knew he was there and wished him back — and the wish was not precise, so the village's other dead came with him. Season one deliberately offers no explanation at all, and a substantial number of viewers prefer it that way.

What are the returned?

Physically identical, undecayed versions of the dead, who wake near where they died, walk home, and have no memory of dying. They eat compulsively, they do not age, they bruise and heal, and they can be killed again. They are not aware of being dead unless told, and the series is specific that they are the same people rather than copies — which is what makes the families' situation impossible rather than merely strange.

What is the significance of the dam and the lake?

The village was flooded to build the reservoir, and the old settlement — including its church — is under the water. Across both seasons the water level drops without explanation as more of the dead return, eventually exposing the church. The series never states the mechanism. What it establishes is that the drowning of the old village and the return of the dead are the same event seen from two ends, and that the water going down is a measure of how much is coming back.

Does Camille die again?

Yes. In the final episode she is shot at, driven away by her father, and the road out of the valley simply ceases to exist; she stops breathing in the car in the woods. Her parents' acceptance of it is the emotional resolution of the entire series, and the show deliberately gives her a second death that nobody caused and nobody could have prevented.

What does the last scene of Les Revenants mean?

That it is starting again. Adèle and Simon's baby is established as being like Victor — a returned child with whatever ability Victor has — and Lucy leaves the infant on a doorstep. Victor hears it crying and is visibly afraid. It is a cliffhanger for a third season that was never made, and read as an ending it says the thing the whole series has said: this is a condition of the valley, not an incident in it.

Is the American remake worth watching?

No. A&E's 2015 version remakes season one closely, was cancelled after ten episodes, and reproduces the plot without the pace, the light or the Mogwai score — which is to say without the only things that made it work. Watch the French original with subtitles.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Pace 012 is extremely slow — only 9 works are slower. Scenes run to their natural length and well past it, and that duration is the entire mechanism.

Tone 014 is bleak — 30 works score lower. Every family in the series is given back what it lost and then has to lose it again, and the last beat is the cycle restarting.

Reality anchor 058 leans towards dream logic — 59 works score lower. The road out of the valley stops existing, the water level tracks the dead, and no mechanism is ever stated.

Viscera 018 is very low — 11 works score lower. A serial killer's attacks, a self-inflicted injury and a shooting, almost all of it off-frame or in brief glimpses.

Era bias 072 leans modern — 63 works score lower. Digital capture, a 2012 French village with mobile phones, and a contemporary television grade.

The threat at 030 is on the supernatural side — 35 works score lower, although the series' only murderer is a living man and the returned mostly want their beds back.

On jump scares: two in two seasons, and the series is not remotely interested in them.