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I urge you all to watch this film in any way that you can. I had the good fortune to do just that yesterday as part of the Fantasporto Festival that I am attending this week and the last and I was left speechless and still as a statue at the end of the film (or should I call it experience?) not being able to move or talk until all the credits rolled.

Am I exagerating? Not really. Once in a while, there is one film that totally subverts the ideas that we take for granted for a certain film genre and yesterday afternoon, this was the one. An event, no less. It will probably win squat, I believe. But such are things.

Anyway, not wanting to give much away, let me just tell you the premise: what would happen if one day all the people that were dead within a 10 year time period suddenly came to life and started leaving the cemiteries? Sounds familiar? Well, this is where it all starts to turn into a whole sociological, psychological, ethical and moral thing because first and foremost, these undead are NOT out to kill you or eat you. They just came back...

This, my dear friends is to me the Night of the Living Dead of the 21st Century. I am not joking and I do not say this lightly. Just think of it as a zombie flick as made by someone like Antonioni or Resnais. Do check it out if you can.

Link to the trailer:

http://www.allocine.fr/film/video_gen_cfilm=53374.html

NOTE: Robin Campillo is also Laurent Cantet's editor, and he also co-wrote the excellent L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out) with Cantet. So the whole rising of the dead thing is no gimmick - it also reflects upon certain European sociopolitical topics as well.

This film will also be showing at the HK Film Fest

Akihiko Shiota's "Yomigaeri" dealt with the resurrection of dead folk in Japn . Not zombies, not demented -- just people returning (at the age they died) no matter how long ago they died.

This was relatively successful in Japan, but I don't think this ever made it out of Asia.

The Shiota's worth a look, though it's often a tad too Spielbergy, and the end (at a rock concert) is ludicrous.

Les Revenants trailer looks VERY similar, contentwise, but its style looks to blow the Shiota away. Looking forward to it.

Hey , I liked "Yomigaeri" -- and what made it most attractive was a lot of really fine acting performances. I wouldn't have been interested in it based on "style". ;~}

Believe me, Les Revenants is FAR superior to Yomigaeri, which was intolerably sappy and has the requisite irritating Japanese singer in the plot. Sorry Kerpan

If you've seen any of Laurent Cantet's films, you'll know roughly the texture and tempo of this one.

I can't see to get the trailer to work, but this sounds fantastic. When's it coming to New York?

denti alligator, They Came Back is being shown during the New Directors/New Films series in NYC from March 23 to April 3, 2005. There are two screenings: 3/26 at 9:00 pm at Alice Tully Hall and 3/27 at 3:30 pm at the Walter Reade. Keep an eye out for the full listing at the Filmlinc ND/NF site. Tickets are $12 general admission and $10 for MoMA or Film Society of Lincoln Center members.

Oops, forgot to mention that the tickets go on sale this Friday, 3/4.

yipee. thanks.

Well, there is still some justice left in the world: this groundbreaking film has won the Melies of Silver at this year's Fantasporto Festival and its director was awarded as well. This apparently means that now it will be in the running for the Melies of Gold.

Great to see some recognition for a film of true art and again I beg all of you to give this one a try when it plays near you. It will be so worth it!

According to amazon, this is due out in R1 via Wellspring on June 21.

I'm definitely intrigued:

Fantastic news! I will definitely be picking up this one. And to think that it was released just this week in the Benelux without any subs whatsoever and not an extra in sight!!

Everyone - buy this DVD when it comes out! It's that good!

According to the link below, the canadian DVD will have the following specs:

RUN TIME:
102

PICTURE:
2.35:1 Anamorphic Widescreen

AUDIO:
French Dolby Digital 5.1

SUBTITLES:
English

BONUS:
• ELECTRONIC PRESS KIT CLIPS
• STILLS GALLERY
• THEATRICAL TRAILER

It will be distributed by Warner and it comes out July, 5th.

http://www.dvdquebec.com/forum/uneporte ... php?t=1435

DVDtalk review here:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=16465

Don't know how I missed this thread, but I ordered of copy of this DVD as a blind buy based just off the trailer (different site) and that I really liked Time Out a lot. Have watched it twice already this past week, and will watch it some more. It's a brilliant take on the 'zombie' genre, deeply affecting, especially the bits with the children. It feels more like science fiction than horror. A very pleasing, quiet, thought-provoking science fiction in the style of Safe by Todd Haynes or Time of the Wolf by Michael Haneke.

I don't know why, but this film makes me think of that devastating heat wave in Europe back in August 2003, where France was hit the hardest, with over 14,000 deaths. I guess, as with the premise of Les Revenants, this just seems like a truly unimaginable event that is hard to understand and come to terms with.

Well, since noone bother to reply, I'll say that your answer has a large percentage of little insight on what the main theme(s) of the film is/are.

First of all, as I said on my first post up there, this is not your average zombie movie, so if you're going in expecting blood, gore and gutural noises you'll be tremendously disapointed. There aren't any. And I mean nothing. Zero.

However, it becomes clear right from the start that this is more a film about Death and how we deal with it (the traumas and so on). And from that point on, it turns out to be something else entirely that is able to transcend the genre completely and successfully. I must admit that I haven't been scared at the sight of undead people this much in a long time. It's like watching a waking bad dream.

For me this was one of the most better realized in terms of ideas set to practice that I've seen in a long, long time. It stands in my book as the best zombie movie ever that is not a zombie movie at all.

I finally caught up with the film this evening and, in short, I was not prepared for the deeply personal way in which the film resonated with me.

But first, let me get the more superficial details out of the way. The tone Campillo creates, and manages to maintain throughout the film, is excellent; it's a numb feeling of dread, confusion, and mourning, and it's slightly Lynchian in effect. I agree with Galen in that the film is quite still and quiet, and much more in the contemplative vein of some sci-fi.

Throughout, Campillo seems to be using the zombie genre's conventions for his own means. The viewer is trained to expect horror as the living dead attack the living, and although Campillo gives us little reason to expect the same, the aura of possible danger looms throughout the film. However, rather than develop this sense of dread into real horror or purely for entertainment's sake, he uses it to convey his still-living characters' mental disposition (confusion, anger, sorrow, etc.) Campillo is using his living dead, much like Romero - his most obvious basis of comparison - to convey multiple metaphors, and the metaphors he's interested in seemed to be quite similar to those expressed by Romero in Day of the Dead (specifically Romero's ideas of what exactly it means to be human). There's also some sociological and political subtext at work, but in my opinion, it's hardly as successful as some more philosophical metaphors...

On a more personal level, I was struck by how closely the film resembled certain memories I had of a recently-deceased loved one; more specifically, dreams I've had since then in which I've come in contact with, and even conversed, with that loved one. Campillo's most resounding message is one of mourning, and how we, as humans, react to the passing of a loved one or even death in general. His living dead are less reanimated corpses, but rather mere physical manifestations of a still-living relative's idealized memories of that person. In real life, this seems to be the way in which we are able to cope with a person's death - our memories of them become our sole impression of them and we use our past to literally live on in the present. In this sense, we are already constructing a portrait of a loved one while they are still alive, in the event that some day, inevitably, either they or us ourselves won't be.

Bravo, neuro! I think you pretty much nailed it down on what the film is all about. Much like you, I also enjoy watching it for similar unfortunate reasons but I was not brave enough to share them all with you. Thank you for your courage.

Guys, I hope this thread is making you aware just how important this film is. Please watch it.

Guys, I hope this thread is making you aware just how important this film is. Please watch it.

I would, but my copy at DeepDiscountDVD has been backordered for two weeks now. It sucks that no B&M stores are carrying this.

Someone want to explain the ending of this movie to me? It went way over my head.

I took the advice of the forum on this and got the region 1 disc. I watched it last summer and thought it was very good (the photography and score are both beautiful), but I decided to watch it again last night and found it only got better on a repeated viewing. I don't know if I was more in the correct frame of mind watching it at midnight in complete darkness rather than on a hot sweltering summer day, but some of the pacing that felt a little slow on first viewing suddenly clicked into place for me. Spoilers follow.

neuro wrote:Campillo is using his living dead, much like Romero - his most obvious basis of comparison - to convey multiple metaphors, and the metaphors he's interested in seemed to be quite similar to those expressed by Romero in Day of the Dead (specifically Romero's ideas of what exactly it means to be human). There's also some sociological and political subtext at work, but in my opinion, it's hardly as successful as some more philosophical metaphors...

I thought neuro's assessment was excellent, and I kept thinking back to the relationship between Bub and Dr Logan in Day of the Dead during this film, especially in the sequence where the inquiry is suggesting that the returned are just mimicking the actions of what they did when they were alive rather than being able to innovate.

Lino wrote:However, it becomes clear right from the start that this is more a film about Death and how we deal with it (the traumas and so on). And from that point on, it turns out to be something else entirely that is able to transcend the genre completely and successfully. I must admit that I haven't been scared at the sight of undead people this much in a long time. It's like watching a waking bad dream.

I agree, it is much more focused on the way the people whose loved ones return react than it is on the returnees themselves. In that sense the tagline on the region 1 disc "Why have the dead suddenly returned...?" is misleading, since we never get an insight into the thinking behind their actions. Though I like the English title "They Came Back", especially as a number of characters can't get past the use of mass terms such as 'they' to describe individual behaviours.

I really liked the structure of the film starting with the mass of living people represented by the inquiry then moving into the individual stories of Isham and his wife and their returned six year old son; the Mayor and his mother; and the major plotline of Rachel and Mathieu with the vague addition of Gardet as an interested observer of their relationship (vague because it thankfully never turns into a love triangle situation). Then we get the breakdown of these tenuous reconnections as the film moves to focus on the mass of the returned as each individual plotline gets climaxed and absorbed into the whole.

While I agree with Lino about it being a refreshing zombie film without gore there is that amazing climax to the Mayor and his mother's story, which until that point has seemed the most innocuous of the three, as his insistence on stopping his mother leaving leads them either to turn on him or grant his wish, depending on the audience's point of view.

The three plotlines also give us three 'alternate endings' if you like with the disturbing end to the Mayor story as the mother succeeds in fleeing, but only with him in tow and the tragic of the boy being 're-killed' before he escapes, while the major plot of Rachel and Mathieu ends the most successfully with escape for Mathieu and a letting go for Rachel despite her making the decision to follow him into the tunnels. (Ironically Rachel is given a 'talking to' by Isham, the mayor and Gardet at various points in the film where they tell her what she is doing wrong and how they assume she is feeling or should feel. Rachel is disconnected from this and in a way ends up getting through the situation more successfully than the others).

Grimfarrow wrote:NOTE: Robin Campillo is also Laurent Cantet's editor, and he also co-wrote the excellent L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out) with Cantet. So the whole rising of the dead thing is no gimmick - it also reflects upon certain European sociopolitical topics as well.

While the personal reactions are the primary focus of the film Grimfarrow hits the nail on the head here with the 'sociopolitical topics' comment. While watching the scenes of the 'Big Brother balloons' or Gardet's surveillance of Rachel and Mathieu, and especially during the final sequence where the 'killed dead' are laid out in their proper place back on their graves where they then fade out of existence, I kept thinking that this film was a 21st century J'Accuse!, but instead of the dead of the First World War coming back to accuse the world of having killed them it is a condemnation of the constraints of modern society where everything is in its place and everyone has a role to fulfil, even the dead! The scene I talked about above which shows the reaction of the authorities to the returned leaving the world in their own way rather than staying in their graves that they have been allocated seems to suggest that prescription and desperate need for people not to act out of the ordinary or, if they do, they have to be isolated, studied and accommodated through being given menial tasks to perform.

That beautiful final juxtaposition between the line of graves after the bodies have faded away to the abandoned conference room equates the two groups (and feels very similar to that cut from the dead and dying soldiers to the empty chairs buffeted by the wind at the end of Kagemusha). The third shot in the sequence though ends the film with hope, as Rachel wipes the misted up mirror to view her own reflection - she has been given a last meeting with Mathieu and can now move on.

An excellent film - thanks guys as it would have been a film I might have missed without your recommendations!

I was debating about exactly where to put this, as it perhaps more correctly fits into the TV section, but I wanted to alert UK viewers to the recent news that Channel 4 is going to screen Les Revenants beginning next month, a French series made last year, and which is apparently inspired by this film (both the film and the TV series are made by the same production company, Haut et Court).

I don't think Les Revenants has had any form of UK DVD release yet (I have the US DVD from Wellspring under the "They Came Back" title), but it is an excellent film and well worth tracking down. Hopefully the series might inspire a release of the earlier feature by some enterprising DVD company! The film plays as a kind of bloodless zombie apocalypse with the focus instead on off-kiler relationship drama between the living and the 'returned'. Campillo is a long time editor of Lauren Cantet's films (The Class, Human Resources, Time Out), which perhaps shows in the almost bureaucratic focus on practical problems of people returning from the dead.

If the series sustains the tension half as much as the film did, then this is a must see!

EDIT: As of 22nd July, Arrow have finally put out the original film on a UK DVD!