One day X, some dead return; here they come, approaching the city in silence and walking slowly. They return from death without anyone knowing why or what drives them to do so.

Perhaps events have imposed this return, and even they, the returned, are not fully aware of it. Their rhythms are now different, and the socio-political-family reactions they provoke seem unpredictable.

Most of them are elderly, 60 percent, but among them are also young adults and children.

The city must address the problem of welcoming them, through the organization of temporary tent camps until identification and possible reintegration into families, workplaces, and society are completed.

Even emotional bonds seem severely tested; facing a dead partner or a prematurely lost child would make one think of a strong emotion to fill and great enthusiasm.

However, things do not seem to go as one might imagine; balances have been reestablished, and even a prematurely deceased child can create significant reintegration problems.

Furthermore, the rhythm between the living and the dead is differently paced; the former's is fast, standardized to daily needs; the latter's, who do not sleep at night and walk continuously, is slow, calm, relaxed, and is compounded by the administration of psychotropic drugs. Their nocturnal meetings with wives, parents, and lovers do not seem to particularly excite either the living or the returned, who probably feel like a disturbance, and the final cruel and violent outcome will reveal the true intentions of the citizens, families, and society as a whole.

Rewatching this enlightening film after 14 years feels like a revelation.

The message, untimely because it was extremely ahead of its time, makes us grasp today more than ever, if possible, how humanity is absolutely incapable of dealing with unforeseen events that might disrupt the headless rhythm of the world.

Any element that disturbs the system of production and consumption must be eliminated.

Democratic words like tolerance, humanity, and hospitality, which in this case are subjected to the harsh test of the mourned dead surprisingly returned alive, reveal the image of the lie: that absolute lie that still somehow has the possibility of telling the truth.

The disgust produced by the living in the returned sparks the willingness to become dead again. The contempt, the inhuman indifference, that befalls those who refuse to participate represents the true face of contemporary alienation.

The revolutionary message of this film has as its protagonist the mechanism of oppression: the socially required sacrifice is so universal that it is revealed only in society as a whole and not in the individual. For Campillo, the society of the living has assumed the illness of all individuals, and in it, in the accumulated madness, subjective evil, buried within the individual, integrates with the objective and visible evil.

For all this, there is no reason that can hold, not even that of making the dead and the living meet; the dialogue is now interrupted, the atrophy of the human reigns, and the ontological impossibility of any relationship.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice