After the dead zombie virus had spread throughout the world, people had found a unique way of treatment. It is called 'protein back from the death' which could be imprisoned inside the virus’s host. When being injected daily, the 'returner' could live as never bitten, although the virus still lived in their veins. When people found that the protein reserves were diminishing, chaos immediately started.
Carballo offsets the lack of surprise with such efficient suspense builders as propulsive music, ambient noise, realistic lighting and judicious handheld camerawork while efficiently explaining the science and politics behind what is happening.
Director Manuel Carballo seems to be trying for the psychological unease of Blindness, or perhaps of something by Cronenberg, but it's never more than artificial terror wrapped in bland social commentary.
The Returned is a zombie movie without the zombies, generating scares through social commentary and human nature, which actually makes for a welcome change of pace.
Carballo squeezes an impressive amount of exposition into news reports and medical briefings, but Holden-Ried's and Hampshire's performances are what ground the film ...
Pivotal scenes dive too deep into melodrama, and there's something inevitably sterile about a script that includes only scenes that propel the plot or provide obvious foreshadowing.
Though an admirable shake-up of the typically overbearing, munch-intensive undead yarn, "The Returned" is still a far cry from the smarts-and-shocks zombie allegories George Romero mastered.
Marred by obvious plot developments...and a disappointingly lazy reliance on the very clichés the movie mostly tries to avoid...The Returned is never quite clever or confident enough to become the subversive zombie film it wants to be.
