The Return

You would think by now that Sarah Michelle Gellar would be tired of monsters, ghouls, madmen and spirits. After rising to fame playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV, she's mainly stuck to thrillers on the big screen such as The Grudge films and I Know What You Did Last Summer. If there is one movie that could scare any actress away from the horror genre, it's most likely The Return. This sleepy-eyed and strangely leisurely thriller offers no thrills to speak of and very little chills to go along with them. At the same time, the movie is not deep or intelligent enough to be classified as psychological horror. British filmmaker Asif Kapadia and relative newcomer screenwriter Adam Sussman throw every horror trick in the book, from loud noises on the soundtrack to characters popping up from out of frame. Unfortunately, instead of creating suspense, these moments simply jolt us awake from the boredom of the movie itself.

Ever since she was a child, traveling sales rep Joanna Mills (Sarah Michelle Gellar) has been haunted by visions she cannot explain of a mysterious long-haired man hunting her down. Because of her troubled past, Joanna is constantly on the move and refuses to be close with anyone. When she returns to her home state of Texas in order to work out a deal with a client, these visions become stronger than ever before, and she finds herself drawn to the small and dusty town of La Salle. Even though she has never been in the town, she recognizes many of the places from her dreams, especially a local bar that seems to play a big part in her vision. It is there that she meets a somewhat shady yet harmless man named Terry Stahl (Peter O'Brien) who seems to have some sort of connection to these strange occurrences. Who is the mysterious stranger that relentlessly stalks her? How does the car accident that Joanna and her father (Sam Shepard) were involved in years ago fit into the puzzle? Will you honestly care when the answers are finally revealed?

The Return's 80 minute running time, combined with the fact that it has been shuffled through numerous release dates throughout this year alone, are tell-tale signs that this movie has made one too many trips to the editing room in a hopeless attempt to try to make the film more marketable to a wide audience. The film is being advertised as a supernatural thriller, and while there are some ghostly happenings here and there, The Return is mainly a slow-paced character driven nightmare rather than the all-out spookfest that one would expect. Normally, I would open this approach with open arms, but the characters and the story itself are way too shallow and underwritten to warrant the more leisurely approach. The paper thin characters of the plot are either non-existent, or they simply come and go as the screenplay sees fit. A good example is a rival at Joanna's company who seems to be jealous of her, and so he follows her all the way to Texas just so that he can harass her at a bar, and somehow follow her back to her hotel room without her noticing and attack her. As soon as this attack scene is finished, he never appears again, nor is ever even brought up. The film is simply filled with too many unnecessary characters, and the characters it does decide to focus on are just not very interesting. We learn very little about Joanna herself, other than that she is haunted by strange nightmares, and her mysterious potential love interest Terry Stahl is just not compelling enough. It's almost like these characters don't know they're supposed to be in a thriller. They're too laid back, and don't seem quite as anxious as they should be in a situation where they are haunted by visions of psychotic madmen and their own pasts.

Oddly enough, the movie itself seems to forget that it's supposed to be a thriller for long periods of time. The movie seems to be in no rush in explaining itself, and many of its mysterious are left unsolved by the time the end credits start to roll. Instead of actually trying to scare us, the movie decides to cheat and have sudden noises blast at high volumes. Radios and record players suddenly turn on by themselves seemingly at random, people come popping out of dark shadows when it should have been painfully obvious to the person being stalked that their pursuer was there the whole time, ghostly figures suddenly pop up in the back seat...These kind of tricks may be effective the first or second time, but when you keep on doing it, it starts to grate on your nerves. Of course, if The Return didn't even have these moments, I don't think you could even call it a horror film. The movie itself develops no sense of terror or tension whatsoever, so it decides to cheat. I'm not sure whether to blame the lack of suspense on screenwriter Adam Sussman, or on the massive amount of time this movie obviously spent in the editing room. The potential for thrills is certainly there in its premise and in its atmospheric small town Texas setting, but it wastes every single opportunity left and right. The end result is a horror film that will find you fighting to hold back your yawns rather than your screams.

The overly leisurely tone of the movie itself seems to carry through into the performances. Sarah Michelle Gellar merely sleepwalks through her thankless role as the tortured Joanna, and doesn't get to create or display a single shred of personality in her performance. She simply is forced to stand around looking tortured and weary, though whether it's the fact that she's being hunted by a madman or if she realizes the stinker that she's stuck in is unclear. Peter O'Brien as the male lead is much the same. His character is supposed to be an isolated and shady man with a checkered past, but we learn very little if anything about him, or about why he's so hated in the town that people literally spit on him as he walks by. The movie doesn't dig deep enough, and therefore, the characters simply come across as being as natural as wooden cardboard cutouts. The film's sole credit is that it certainly knows how to create atmosphere with some potentially spooky locations and abandoned buildings. But all the atmosphere in the world is worth nothing if you just let it go to waste on pointless scenes that fail to raise the slightest bit of tension. Even the ending when some of the answers are revealed is strangely empty instead of fulfilling. Maybe it's because it's built around a character who was introduced literally just two minutes before the climax starts. Because we know nothing about this character, we feel nothing when his role in the story is revealed.

The Return is a textbook example of a movie that's been put under the editing knife one too many times in order to salvage what the studio instantly recognized as being an instant flop. It's barely coherent, doesn't seem to have a single thought in its head, and is far too sloppy in its storytelling to make it come across as being worth your time. It's not unwatchable, but there's just no reason for anyone to see it because it doesn't do anything well. The Return is strictly mediocre and subpar in just about every aspect, and with theater space being limited, there's no room for mediocre and subpar. If this doesn't move Mrs. Gellar away from the horror genre, at least it will hopefully inform her that she should be a bit choosier in picking her projects.

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