As more than 1.5 million viewers tuned into Channel 4’s supernatural drama The Returned, the original cult hit feature film on which the show is based has been confirmed for a UK DVD release.
In Robin Campillo’s Les Revenants (retitled for the UK release as The Returned), the lives of a French town is dramatically changed forever when thousands of the recently dead inexplicably come back to life.
While the former dead seem content merely to go back to their former lives, their return causes a myriad of complications.
Isham and Véronique have their trepidations, but they’re generally happy, at first, to see their little boy Sylvain, and the town’s elderly mayor welcomes home his wife, Martha.
But Rachel, a government health official, cannot bring herself to visit her newly returned husband, Mathieu, 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…
The Returned is out on DVD Monday 22nd July 2013, courtesy of Arrow Films – Buy today from Amazon.co.uk
