Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 10, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The Return is the kind of movie that should be either longer or shorter. That is, it would have benefitted from either exploring its characters and situations in more depth, or trimming down the slim story that is there into a nice, tight half-hour anthology piece. As it stands, the movie has neither the gripping narrative to sustain a mystery nor enough shocks and chills to qualify as a successful horror film. And the longer the story goes on, the more you may get the sense that it’s focusing on the wrong character.
Sarah Michelle Gellar stars as Joanna Mills, a trucking company rep who takes a business drive from her current home in St. Louis to the rural area of Texas where she grew up. A prologue establishes that something scary happened to her at a carnival when she was a young girl, and it’s not long after she arrives in the Lone Star State when she starts having odd flashes of more scary stuff happening. They seem to center on a bar in the small town of La Salle, and Joanna decides to take a side trip to check it out. Before she can get to the bottom of her visions, however, she encounters a more pressing problem in the form of her a-hole ex-boyfriend/competitive co-worker Kurt (Adam Scott), who has somewhat implausibly followed her all the way to Texas to rough her up.
Of course, without Kurt making the scene, there wouldn’t be a good reason for local strong, silent type Terry (Peter O’Brien) to intercede and rescue her, and then become a focal point of Joanna’s investigation. The longer she hangs around in La Salle, plagued by a mysterious, threatening pursuer and picking up clues to her past here and there, the more it becomes evident that her history is somehow tied in with Terry’s. It also becomes increasingly clear that it’s in his backstory that the true drama lies; Terry has been living with the aftermath of a violent event for years, and focusing on his struggle to overcome it, as opposed to Joanna’s standard-issue psychic tsuris, might well have benefitted The Return.
As it stands, this is mild paranormal intrigue of the type one might see on late-night television, though director Asif Kapadia and his team of craftspeople have succeeded in making The Return feel like a real feature film. The best thing about the movie is its evocative rural Southwest atmosphere, thanks to Roman Osin’s widescreen photography (which frequently isolates Joanna at the edges of the frame) and Therese DePrez’s gritty and lived-in production design. You really feel like you’re there in the desolate landscapes and grungy old buildings—which makes it a shame that the narrative isn’t equally engaging. Pieces of Adam Sussman’s script seem to have been left out, and what’s left is sometimes inconsistent; we’re told at points that Joanna spent her childhood around La Salle, and then later she says she’s never been there before. The most unfortunate development, though, is Joanna’s discovery of a crucial piece of evidence that hinges on her being in just the right place and seeing just the right photo on just the right wall at just the right time.
Gellar is capable enough in her most grown-up genre role yet, and she and O’Brien (an Australian actor who’s effortlessly convincing as a down-home Texan) do good work with characters who don’t have too much in the way of shading. The rest of the actors are perfectly fine in functional parts, including the great Sam Shepard, who doesn’t have enough to do as Joanna’s estranged father. After a couple of set-up scenes in the first act, he disappears until close to the very end, where a concluding sequence finally reveals Joanna’s original connection to the past events. It’s a nicely done sequence that graces The Return with something of an emotional payoff, but too much of the preceding 70 minutes is as laconic as a hot Texas afternoon.
