They Returned is a beautifully touching and unnerving story about the unexplained disappearance of three children, two boys and one girl, and their reappearance three days later in a semi-autistic state. Not even the children themselves are able to help anyone understand what happened.
Direction
Iván Noel's patient, painterly framing turns Argentina into a purgatory.
Acting
The child actors deliver genuinely disturbing vacant performances.
Cinematography
Golden hour never looked so deeply unsettling.
Director
Iván Noel
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Argentina's real history of Nazi immigration and hidden war criminals directly informs the film's institutional conspiracy elements.
The semi-autistic state of the returned children deliberately mirrors historical accounts of 'shell shock' and dissociative trauma, suggesting the film's horror is psychological before it's supernatural.
AR
