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This edition of Watch Out! is a preempt edition. By that I mean I had another movie I was going to talk about, but I'm settling on this one because Joel Silver's production company had just nabbed the remake rights. Before we hear anything more about the American remake, I want to encourage people to see this unusual "horror" film for what it is, not what it's going to be compared to.

Back in the Fall of 2004, I was right in the middle of a zombie kick. Having seen (and predictably annoyed by) Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead, I was thrilled that they released a three-disc Ultimate Edition of the original and immediately bought it. Watching the three versions provided in the set only made me want to revisit and discover more zombie films, which led to a Netflix queue populated by Return of the Living Dead, all the Lucio Fulci flicks and various Asian zombie movies I'd never even heard of before my unholy quest. Finally, after exhausting myself with ample gore and flesh bitings, I desired for something more. The timing was right, because that was when I got my hands on a 2004 French film called Les Revenants, aka They Came Back.

Technically, it is a zombie film, but it doesn't belong in the same group as those other movies I mentioned. Not at all. This film presents zombies that try to assimilate into society instead of attempting to gnaw your eyelids off. It's not a horror movie, unless we're talking about the emotional horror it brings. Though it's thoroughly unsettling—in the sense that the returned dead are so weird and mysterious that they mount tension—it's not a thriller, nor does it offer any traditional suspense. It's foremost a very somber French drama, exploring the tough stages we go through as human beings upon foisted with something as bleak as death.

In They Came Back, the dead walks; not as rotting corpses, but as confused, almost braindead, beings. Like George Romero's more traditional zombie movies, the story offers no explanation as to how or why the dead came back. A small French town just woke up one day and found 70 million "zombies" shuffling down the streets. The film then asks: what now? In other zombie movies, the solution is always as simple as the pull of a shotgun's trigger. Here, the town leaders have to rack their brains figuring out where to house the extra population, how to keep them from joining the unemployment pool, and all the other bureaucratic nightmare that this phenomena is causing. The real nightmare, however, is not suffered by the government, but the families of the returned instead. A widow has to try and restart a marriage with a "zombie" husband, like an awkward reunion after a long separation period. A couple has to confront their grief when their son comes back, still a little boy, after a decade of being dead.

The premise reads like a darkly comic satire (like Fido), but it's not. It takes itself very seriously, and the anguish the characters go through is genuinely draining. Director Robin Campillo wanted to explore our process of mourning in the form of the resurrected undead, but it ended up also challenging the fear for our own mortality and asks what kind of closure we expect from our departed loved ones. Is it within our right to ask for a satisfying and prolonged goodbye? The ambiguous ending reflects this uncertainty, as the dead leaves as mysteriously as they enter. Death, in any form, is uncertain and most of the time unexpected. They Came Back examines why people like to hold on to the living—be it in memory or a vegetative state—so tightly that they deny the fact that it might be wiser to let go and move on. Who benefits from stubbornness? It's a tough question, and while the film doesn't answer them (how could it?), its raising of the question in itself is fascinating to watch.

It would be interesting and probably frustrating to see how Joel Silver handles the remake. Would it be re-appropriated as a social satire? Would they manufacture more suspense to make it more of a thriller? Or would they stay true to the dramatic slow-burn of the original and risk it being at odds with the company's other more heavily action-oriented films?

French Trailer

Watch Out! is a feature on JustPressPlay where Arya Ponto showcases lesser-known, lesser-appreciated and often bizarre small films that are cool and deserve to get some attention.

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