The Returned

All of this may seem complicated but is not only easy to follow, but impossible to ignore because of the care with which Gobert, Fabien Adda and other writers weave the stories and characters together. You come away from each episode of The Returned more deeply involved in the story and characters than you may be used to with other TV shows. It’s a series that will haunt you, in the best possible way.

By the end of episode three (titled after yet another brand-new character, Morgane), almost everyone is miserable, and there doesn’t seem to be much hope for relief from the unrelenting gloom. Thankfully, the show remains so brilliantly acted and written, and so masterfully shot, it’s never anything less than compelling.

Though it is deliberate in pace and and often low-key, this show does supply what a drama returning on Halloween absolutely must have: scares.

The Returned is mesmerizing television.... The first three new episodes complicate the plot more than advance it.... But the questions are tantalizing. Like HBO’s “The Leftovers,” this is a gorgeous, full-hearted drama about grief, rich with metaphor.

There is a quiet naturalism to the production, quite distinct from Hollywood horror, in which every trick in the audio-visual book is marshaled to jolt you as far as possible out of your seat when the scare comes, and also from supposedly found-footage films ("The Blair Witch Project" and its progeny) that use aesthetic chaos to suggest actuality. This is altogether more mature.

The achievement of The Returned is that it creates its frights chiefly from an atmosphere of the quietly uncanny. Indeed, the show is at its best when it’s impossible to tell who is more dead: the returned population, or the living whose souls have expired from despair.

Season two may not have the punch of the series premiere's bus crash and return, but it has a tonal grayness that matches the lost nature of its characters. It sometimes feels more meandering than moody--not unlike the now-tonally similar “The Leftovers” did in season one.

Every frame of this beautifully filmed living-ghost fable is suffused with mystery and the alluring dread of the unknown. There are very few hard scares in the story, more like sustained and hypnotic tingle of unease. [26 Oct - 8 Nov 2015, p.15]