They Came Back is, without a doubt, the most interesting zombie film since Dawn of the Dead. Much more innovative with its material than 28 Days Later, though its not really fair to compare the two. The dead have returned, but not as horrid, rotting corpses, and not to feast upon the flesh of the living. They've returned to claim their old lives, jobs, and relationships, to return to society, or so it seems.
Centered in a non-descript French town the film opens with the parade of idyllic dead lumbering down the central thoroughfare. They apppear clean, and neatly dressed, our ideal image of our lost loved ones. Their skin suffers from a slightly sick palor, and is strangely beatific. At first these 'returnees' seem only slightly slow in their reintegration, something most of the townspeople are eager to help them accomplish. It's hard to imagine your wife, child, mother, returning to pick up where they left off. Are they asking too much? Have they the right to their old lives? To its credit the city, in typical French fashion, sets up a refugee center where the 'returnees' are cataloged, and family contact initiated. Through the experiences of three of the 'returnees' and their respective families we see the emotional turmoil this situation is causing.
The primary focus is on Matthieu, a 30 something engineer whose relationship with Rachel was cut short by a car accident. At first reluctant, Rachel eventually welcomes Matthieu back into her life, and bed. Partially out of love, and partially out of guilt for the death she deems as her fault, she attempts restart their life together. This is not unlike the relationship of Kelvin to his own 'visitor', his dead wife, in the Tarkovsky film "Solaris". Like Kelvin, Rachel tries to block out the outside world, here embodied by the interest and concern of one of the 'returnee' center doctors. She just wants to get back to the life she had, or at least try to. Ultimately the nature of Matthieu makes it impossible to do so. As much as she would like to ignore the fact that he never sleeps, and seems to be always in a state of blankness, she cannot. The rest of the town begins to notice these differences too, and soon some nefarious doings are discovered.
Interesting things begin to be noticed by the local committee set up to help with the reintegration. For one, the 'returnees' seem to travel a distance of 9 miles every day. They also are noticed to congregate as if meeting, and thereby plotting with one another. What's more, they appear to be incapable of creating or relating to new experiences and memories. They appear to operate on vague remeberances of similar situations. This aspect of the film is laid out very well, and one would expect it to pay off with a consequence more befitting the genre. While we do get some nice scenes of a more sinister nature on the part of the psuedo-zombies, this serves to raise questions that the film never really answers. It's as if it can't decide where to go with itself and only half-develops this sub-plot. We are never told why they are meeting, or why they become more anti-social as time goes on. The film leaves us to draw our own conclusions on these matters. Perhaps they've remembered enough and now long for the grave. Maybe they understand where they truly belong.
In the end, it's more a meditation on grief, and mourning than a zombie movie. While the movie draws heavily from the genre expectations, it's core is much closer to Solaris, a film about what it means to be alive. We can then see They Came Back as a complimentary piece, a movie about what it means to be dead, not so much for the effect of death on the individual, but the effect of the death on the survivors.
I've seen this film described as a comedy, and I really don't get that. I think the tendency of some viewers who aren't used to the Gallic sensibilities, to read into it humor is misguided. The movie is very, very somber, with a beautiful score to match. It broaches its subject with a quiet eeriness that is anything but hilarious.