After an overwhelming response to the premiere last week, Great at 8 continues tomorrow at 8pm with the next episode of the thrilling French mystery series The Returned.
If you missed out, you can watch Episode 1 in our exclusive online screening room, just in time to catch the rest of the series when it continues tomorrow. You can catch up now HERE.
As if the gripping storylines and beautiful imagery weren’t enough, we’ve found the top 5 reasons you NEED to watch this captivating new series below, courtesy of What Culture.
1. It revamps the idea of zombies
These aren’t staggering, groaning decaying bodies with the need to consume flesh, the returned are living functioning humans who don’t even realise they are dead. The only noticeable features they have are a huge appetite and the lack of need for sleep. In fact, they are more like ghosts coming to terms with the fact that people have moved on since their passing. They feel, they love and they have regrets like the living.
2. The eerie locations
With the Scandinavians taking over the cinematic polished looking dramas, this French show has taken more of an inspiration from David Lynch’s noir soap opera Twin Peaks. The misty little village that plays as the main setting is actually Annecy (near where the Alp murders unfortunately happened in real life). There is a huge dam that becomes not only an eerie backdrop, but also a great plot point as events unfold. The director instructed that they only filmed between 4pm and 9pm so there is a constant state of dusk. All of this is accompanied by music by Scottish band Mogwai that is sure to leave a shiver down your spine. This is the kind of atmosphere Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story could only wish for.
3. The characters aren’t clichés
Camille’s mother runs to hide all traces of the shrines left in her daughter’s room when she finds her teenage daughter not a day older raiding her fridge. The fact Camille and Lena are twins is somewhat poignant after Lena has grown into a woman who regularly engages in adult activity, while Camille is stuck in a body of a young teenager. Adele, the would-be wife and mother of Simon’s now nine year old daughter, is suitably confused by Simon’s appearance, and puts it down to seeing the ghost of her past love. Victor, played by the wonderfully sinister Swann Nambotin, has said that after the show aired, people would run away from him in the streets of Lyon where he lives. No character here is obviously good nor obviously evil, leaving the audience to read between blurred lines.
4. The mysteries
The wonderful thing is that the dead don’t know why they have returned, nor do the living. Each episode gives away enough to keep you intrigued, but you don’t feel like you’ve been hand fed the answers. There are some indicators that this isn’t the first time ‘The Returned’ have appeared – An elderly husband says ‘not again’ when his younger deceased spouse reappears, and the church priest has ambiguous feelings that this is not so unusual. Victor and other deceased characters pop-up throughout flashbacks that slowly reveal more about these characters, and the incidents that led to their deaths.
5. Gore and sex in the right doses
The French have mastered the art of appreciation for the human body – and there’s certainly just the right amount of skin in The Returned. The nudity doesn’t seem to have the gratuitous touch shows like True Blood has. If the walking dead isn’t enough horror, the village also has to deal with a grisly murderer who eats his victim’s inner organs. Victor is perfectly cast as this deathly-pale child who appears on roadsides and through windows like an omen child -he also casually throws himself out of windows, with a word not spoken for half of the series.
This may not be Saw but it has some similarity to Let The Right One In. If you want the slow chills of an atmospheric Twin Peaks style horror or the stylistic gore of Hannibal, you will love The Returned.
Article sourced from What Culture, you can check out the full article here.
