Les Revenants.

This movie really, really irritated me. I’m not even going to put screenshots in this post, because I don’t want to spend the time picking through the scenes.

Not that it was fantastically terrible, oh no! But because I was entirely ready to sing its praises until, literally, the last second of the film.

But let’s start from the beginning. The premise is lovely in its simplicity: everyone who has died in the last ten years is, suddenly and without explanation, back. They just walk back into town, totally unharmed and apparently with no memory of their respective deaths. What follows is an examination of society’s reaction to their return. The government is trying to complete a census, the medical community is trying to study them, and their surviving relatives are trying to deal with their emotions. Suddenly, companies are required to return jobs that have already been taken, and the pensions of retirees must be reinstated. It soon becomes apparent that the revenants are a little ‘off’. They stare vaguely into space, and do not seem to entirely comprehend the present. One doctor forms the theory that their intelligence is an illusion, and that they are simply echoing fragments of their past experience. It is also found (through a surveillance system that tracks the revenants through their slightly lower body temperature) that they seem to have boundless energy, wandering slowly through the night with no apparent goal.

Slowly, we begin to see that something more sinister is afoot. The revenants gather in odd ‘meetings’, repeating the same information about a route to a set of tunnels we hear about throughout the movie. It all comes to a head one night when they set out in full force, quietly making their way to the tunnels while repeating the instructions: “past a brightly lit store… we can open it together…”  They enter the tunnels in small groups, but by now there have been a few incidents, and the military is starting to react with a concentrated version of a drug previously used to keep the revenants more docile. The drug is dispersed as a gas, and we see them try to escape more hurriedly. A number of them fall. The woman whose attempts to adjust to her returned lover we’ve been following is taken to the tunnels. She wanders in the dark for a while and is eventually abandoned, resurfacing as the sun comes up. The busses, which transported the revenants when they first arrived, now hold their comatose bodies. They are laid out upon their gravestones. There are less than three minutes left in the film. I count them, eagerly awaiting the last, shocking twist. Where are the revenants? What are they trying to open in the tunnels? What could possibly happen next?

13… 12… 11… The bodies on the tombstones slowly begin to turn transparent and fade. I am bewildered. 9… 8… 7… The woman steps out of her shower. She wipes the steam methodically from the mirror to reveal her face. She smiles.

Roll credits.

 

What.

 

What?

 

What the hell, movie?

This thing was damn near a work of art. The soundtrack was sparse and tense. The pacing was just slow enough to be suspenseful. The mood seemed to build, to writhe like some vast monster beneath the surface of the movie, and then…

It’s like the director just gave up. Looked at what he’d done and said: “Pffft… to hell with this. Let’s go have some sandwiches.”

I felt genuinely robbed.

My conclusion: Don’t see Les Revenants. Everything that is good about it comes crashing down in so ignominious a way as to render the whole thing a failure. Seriously, just… just go watch Twilight. At least then, you’ll know before you sit down that you’ll be ripped off.

 

Spin.

Les Revenants is © to Haut and Court.