The Return

Director Asif Kapadia makes a valiant effort to exceed the tired clichés of today’s redundant supernatural thrillers with The Return, a film full of “nice try” moments that at least imply the director had hoped to make this interesting. Unfortunately, it’s about as tired as every Grudge, Ring, and other paranormal whatnot in recent horror history. However, Kapadia gets points for not simply sending a little blonde schoolgirl into a big scary house. In Joanna Mills, (Sarah Michelle Gellar) he gives us a creatively distraught heroine full of morbid feelings and self destructive tendencies. She’s a tragic twentysomething on the run from her entire life who bounces around hotels and finds a lifelong battle with supposed hallucinations culminating unexpectedly during a business trip in Texas.

Gellar (a talented actress who is sadly shaping up to be little more than the supernatural Ashley Judd) gives her all to what little material there is for her to play, but we never really know enough about Joanna to like her or care about her. Kapadia admirably infuses some more moody character moments into the film to help give it a tinge of depth, but these are sprinkled so loosely throughout the film and so poorly elaborated upon that none of the characters really gets satisfactorily fleshed out for the audience. Instead of being a sympathetic heroine, Joanna comes off as a contrived approximation of a troubled young woman.

The greatest trouble here is that the film cannot decide whether it wants to be a supernatural character drama or a much more complacent horror schlock piece. In the end, it mixes cheap scares with daddy issues and gets its wires crosses somewhere in the mix of it all. Both the horror plot and the dramatic elements are underdeveloped while weird tangents such as an abusive ex-boyfriend and an annoyingly shallow depiction of self mutilation get screen time that would have been better spent developing the real core of the film. I appreciate The Return’s attempts to be a more thoughtful and reflective variation on a much covered genre, but it’s just not done nearly well enough to be recommendable.

Grade: C