Summary
The Resurrected manages to stand out in an overcrowded revenge genre through a fusion of supernaturalism with bleak, complex human drama.
If there’s a right month to resurrect a person, it’s probably October. Netflix is certainly banking on this, anyway, since their nine-part Taiwanese original The Resurrected plays right to the spook season audience from the very opening frames. A dirty monkey, brought back from the dead in some kind of shamanistic ritual. Candlelight. Hoods. Jerky movements. Dark magic. It’s all here and accounted for, like a bingo card of expected genre tropes hitting full house in the first two minutes.
But the hook of The Resurrected is that it’s very much not this kind of show. The cliche-ridden opening is the setup for a narrative that’s significantly darker in a deeply human way, full of intense personal suffering and loss. The supernaturalism is a gateway to a kind of exploded revenge story, the otherworldly elements allowing the themes to be taken to their most logical and sinister extremes. It’s a good idea that keeps building on itself as it goes, not so much in a traditional “twisty” sense, but in the spiralling exploration of a rabbit hole that quickly seems bottomless.
Witnessing the resurrection of a monkey in the opening scenes gives Hui-chun (Shu Qi) and Chao Ching (Angelica Lee) an idea, albeit not the one they initially started with. Both women have recently lost their daughters in the same way – victims of a notorious criminal named Shih-kai (Meng-po Fu), whose scamming syndicate trafficked young women through Southeast Asia and brutalised them into fraudulent schemes. Hui-chun’s daughter, Jin Jin, is alive but comatose and unlikely to recover. Chao Ching’s daughter, Hsin-yi, was horrifically tortured to death. Both women are instrumental, alongside another victim’s mother, a lawyer named Huang I-chen (Alyssa Chia, The Falls, At the Moment Season), in bringing Shih-kai to justice via the death penalty.
But is that kind of justice really enough? This is the compelling foundation on which The Resurrected is built. Hui-chun and Chao Ching’s initial efforts to resurrect their daughters – impossible since one is technically still alive and the other has been cremated, her body too deconstructed to be reassembled again – give way to a new idea to resurrect Shih-kai, and use the extra time afforded to them to enact their own vengeance. It’s an exceptionally bleak idea, taking the classic notion of a grieving parent’s wish to spend five minutes in a locked room with their child’s killer and stretching it out into a seven-day period, one unfettered by legalities or the laws of nature. How far might these two women go, and how much of themselves will they lose in the process?
This only works as a character drama. It’s imperative to understand Hui-chun and Chao Ching as individuals, how their circumstances differ but their pain unites them. Neither is presented as being entirely noble or flawless from the start, which is perhaps the point of a script that picks the scabs of imperfections and lingering regrets and lets them fester into open sores. The idea of revenge becomes an elusive salve, a way to ease the burden of a grief that feels impossibly heavy. The real meat of The Resurrection doesn’t live in the more fantastical horror-adjacent elements, but in the convenient lies Chao Ching and Hui-chun tell themselves to justify how far they’re willing to go, the things they’re willing to do, all in the name of a vengeance they have convinced themselves is righteous.
Hopefully, you don’t need me to tell you how difficult this is to pull off, and so it hopefully counts for something when I say that, at least in the couple of episodes Netflix provided to press for review, this show really nails the balance. Progress in the overarching, titular resurrection plot may be slow, but that’s entirely by design. The grounding of the audience in the headspace and tortured realities of its two protagonists is the crucial human firmament on which this story, on face value a bit ridiculous, is built. Its nine episodes, all running a shade under an hour, need the careful character-driven build-up to lend a deeply serious quality to its more fanciful narrative components.
All told, the balance is capably achieved and feels dynamic enough in execution that The Resurrected has a near-immediate vibe of a genuinely new, provocative take on the well-worn revenge drama. Strong, grounded performances keep it couched in reality, even while the supernatural elements outgrow the boundaries of possibility and logic. Netflix’s diverse international catalogue has its fair share of revenge dramas, but none quite like this one, which in our current climate has to be commended, imperfections and all.
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