Business woman Joanna Mills travels to her hometown in Texas to close a deal with one of her clients. Once there, she starts having flashbacks from her childhood when she was stalked by some mysterious stranger, and she also starts seeing a woman that was brutally murdered.
First off, marketing this film as a horror movie is just plain wrong because The Return is simply just not a horror flick and going in thinking that it is will of course only make matters worse. The first time I heard about this movie I naturally got the impression that it would in fact be a horror film that would bear resemblance to the horrible Grudge flicks and what else. In other words, it didn't sound interesting and seeing that Sarah Michelle Gellar were gonna star in it only made things worse. Luckily, that was not the case and while that does not mean that it was a great film, it simply means that it was interesting enough and had nothing in common with the way it had been marketed.
Forget about The Grudge and totally forget about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and instead be open to that this is a slow moving suspense thriller that has not been edited showing clips that lasts for three seconds each in half the scenes and the other one's featuring Grudge-ish type of horror. The Return is a thriller, nothing more, nothing less. It is slow and not too much stuff actually happens but it has a nice feel to it and some stunning visuals.
 
Gellar is good and she looks alright in her dark hair, problem though is that it's (really) hard not thinking about Buffy when you see her and take her for the business woman character that she portrays. I think it took me like half an hour to be able to take her character seriously, but once I did, I found it to be quite enjoyable. Thing though is there's nothing wrong with a slow movie but at the same time the slowness has to have some kind of reward to it in the end and unfortunately it doesn't have that here. It just ends leaving you to wonder, was that it? Well it does not leave you totally unsatisfied, but asking for a bit more would not be asking for too much.
The film opens at a carnival where a little girl is being followed by a stranger. When she tells her daddy about it all, he explains that it was probably just the trauma from a car accident they both happened to be in several months earlier. Fast forward a whole bunch of years and the young girl is now a business woman living in St. Louis but soon heads down to a place close to her old hometown in Texas to close a deal with a customer. Once there, she start to suffer from flashbacks being in a bar she has never been to and also seeing a strange face in the mirror. And if that was not enough, she starts seeing the stalker from when she was young. She soon develops a friendship with a town outcast but later suspects that there's something fishy about him too.
While the story itself is not impressive it sure works all right, even though it does not have the amount of suspense one would've hoped for. Like I said before, the film's slow and it stays like that pretty much all the way through. The whole Texan feel is great though and the visuals are at times truly a work of art, and there's a lot of them to be seen. What made this movie work for me was pretty much the scenery and the atmosphere it delivered, and the little mystery that it had to it of course played out pretty well too, even if nothing special. I can't really see anyone saying that this is a great film, but I could definitely see people renting it and enjoying it on a slow night.
Again, it has nothing to do with The Grudge except for two things, one being that it stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and the second being that it was marketed as a similar looking horror film. A fairly enjoyable thriller, just don't expect too much.
By
Back to Horror Review Archive
|
ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Revolver, Untitled Supernatural Thriller
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Asif Kapadia
WRITING CREDITS: Adam Sussman
GENRE: Supernatural Thriller
CAST: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sam Shepard, Darrian McClanahan
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 85 min
RATING: 5/10
Return, The Website/IMDB Click here
Return, The Trailer Click here
|
