Have you ever wanted to resurrect a loved one in order to spend more time with them? Or maybe bring back an enemy to give them the piece of your mind you never got a chance to do? A new series from Taiwan imagines two mothers who bring back a man who tortured their daughters.
Opening Shot: A ceremonial space, late at night. A full moon shows through the clouds.
The Gist: Two women, Wang Hui-chun (Shu Qi) and Chao Ching (Sinje Lee), witness this ceremony, where a young shaman has a monkey killed just to show that she can resurrect it. The woman go to the shaman and ask if their daughters can be resurrected. But since Chao Ching’s daughter’s body has been cremated, it’s not intact, and Wang Hui-chun’s daughter is still in a coma; the shaman can’t resurrect someone who isn’t dead yet. But the women witness parents whose child has been resurrected; they see the boy disappear after being back with his parents for seven days.
In the present day, the women are awaiting the execution of Chang Shih-kai (Fu Meng-po), a financial con artist who also tortured and killed teenage girls. Hui-chun’s daughter Jin Jin (Vivi Chen) has been in a coma for five years, and Ching’s daughter Hsin-yi (Caitlin Fang) was killed. A third mother, Huang I-chen (Alyssa Chia), also had a daughter, An Chi (Lin Ting-yi), who was tormented by Chang; she’s also a lawyer that represents the other two women in both criminal and civil suits against Chang.
On the criminal side, the trio has been successful in getting the death penalty for Chang, but the civil suit has been unsuccessful, because he’s shielded his family’s copious assets from him and his activities. Money has been tough, and Hi-chun has taken to social media to raise money for Jin Jin to go from Benkha back to her home in Taiwan; Hi-chun’s husband feels that the money is wasted on Jin Jin, who may never wake up.
After Chang is executed via lethal injection, both Ching and Hui-chun don’t feel justice was served; he got a relatively peaceful death while their daughters were repeatedly assaulted and tortured. They hatch a plan to get their proper revenge, involving the resurrection ceremony they saw five years earlier.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Resurrected is similar in its uncanny tone as Alice In Borderland.
Our Take: The Resurrected looks like a show that’s going to operate on more than one level, but in a way that might prove to be confusing to viewers, if the first episode is any indication. We dive right in from the first scene, showing what the resurrection ceremony looks like, and the parameters under which the people who are resurrected exist. What we don’t know as that episode starts is that it’s taking place in the past.
When Hi-chun and Ching present themselves to the shaman, we start to get the idea of what they want, but we were definitely confused by the graphic that said “Present Day.” Wasn’t it already the present day? The only real difference was that Ching had slightly less hair in the presence. Eventually, though, the timeframes became clearer to discern.
There certainly are a lot of blanks that need to be filled in, though; how does Chang go from being a financial scammer to someone who tortures young girls? And how did the daughters of Ching, Hi-chun and I-chen get snared in his trap? We can see the scenes going back and forth in time, especially as the women execute their plan to bring Chang back and make him pay for what he did to their daughters.
What that will look like is going to be the most interesting part of the series. Given how horrifically he treated their daughters, it seems that lethal injection was too good for him in their eyes. But what will these women come up with that gives him a taste of his own medicine? And how will that reconcile with the way they are as people, i.e. not evil?
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: The women decide to resurrect Chang, and we push in on Chang lying on the gurney where he got the lethal injection, raising his head and looking in horror.
Sleeper Star: Alyssa Chia’s character I-chen is much more realistic about the limits of what can be done to Chang than either Ching or Hi-chun imagine. But her daughter is still alive and conscious.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Her son’s dying tomorrow and she’s still shopping,” Ching says of Chang’s mother as they follower through a luxury shopping mall.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Resurrected is a bit strange and somewhat disjointed, but the prospects of where the story can go with the resurrection storyline are fascinating to contemplate.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.