In the show’s wake beret sales are up 4000%. Beaujolais Nouveau gushes from our taps. Why, you can barely walk down the street these days without hearing ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’ wheezing through the evening air from a nearby accordion. Even the weather’s turned decidedly continental.

So it seems like the perfect time to enjoy the movie where it all began – Les Revenants, released in France in 2004 but only now making it across la Manche on DVD. Or as the French say, DVD.

If you’ve watched the series then you’ll find its cinematic big brother as familiar and chilling as an undead loved-one rifling through your fridge. The pace, the incredibly evocative cinematography, the use of surveillance camera footage, even the font used in the credits, were all resurrected for the series, and it means that there’s a déjà vu of aesthetic continuity between what is essentially two different takes on the same event.

Yet unlike the parochial view taken by the series, Les Revenants flatly informs us that this is a worldwide resurrection – 70 million people have got up in the middle of their big sleep for a prolonged wander – and then sharply contrasts the macro-scale U.N relief effort with the emotionally-charged nature of each personal reunion. The Mayor is reunited with his elderly wife; a couple are gifted their son back; an attractive health official prevaricates over the decision to visit her returned husband, Mathieu, a summa cum laude graduate of the school of silent empty-eyed types; majoring in erie faint smile, and minoring in freaking people out by his very presence.

The difficulties of reintegration, both emotionally and economically are deftly conveyed as a zombie underclass is created, which consists of the aphasic lot standing around, blankly staring into the middle-distance. It is inexplicably uncanny in the way that seeing a dim-witted farmhand contemplating a pitchfork might send a chill down your spine. Your mind fills in the gaps behind their vacant stares with nightmarish conclusions. This is what Les Revenants does exceptionally well – handing you a few unsettling mental bricks and then giving you the space to terrify yourself as you build your own theories.

And yet it’s also that equivocation which undermines the very foundations of the movie. Watching The Returned is akin to having a big balloon with a scary face daubed on it slowly inflated in front of your eyes. Every scene adds a new huff and puff of unsettling suburban uncertainty – increasing the tension until any minute you expect the whole thing to pop and deliver something that’ll jolt you right down to your soul. ‘Mais non‘. There is no pop, no bang. Instead the film’s desire to be as perpetually enigmatic as possible means that at the end the whole thing deflates and collapses back in on itself into an ambiguous shrivelled mass.

What Les Revenants does have is a wealth of provocative ideas, but not the room to deal with all of them. Watching it you can’t help but fear that the same may happen to the series. Probably best not to think of that though while we’re all still so in love with it.

Released on DVD on Monday 22 July 2013 by Arrow Films.

> Order The Returned TV series on DVD on Amazon.

Watch the TV series trailer…

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