Film Reviews

The Return

• Rating:
• Director: Asif Kapadia
• Starring: Adam Scott
• Details: US / 85mins (15A).

Dylan Moran, in the guise of the misanthrope Bernard Black, once commented on a book saying: "It's awful, but it's short," and the same can be said for The Return. The brief 85 minutes running time is a godsend as The Return never really gets out of the starting blocks. Gellar, for whom the smell of TV is stinking up every attempt she makes to break into film, plays Joanna Mills, a sales woman for a trucking company whose job has her travelling all over the country - everywhere except Texas, that is. When a big contract opportunity comes about with a Texas businessman, Joanna takes the plunge and crosses the state border. As soon as she does, Joanna begins to see things that may or may not be there and when she hallucinates about the murder of a woman, she must dive deep into her own past to stop it from happening. The Return, despite the end product, must be given some sort of praise for concentrating on the suspense angle instead of the gore. Kapadia waits along time to say 'boo!' and hopes that we'll be so drawn in and enticed by what has gone before, we'll jump three feet in the air. It was a good theory, but in waiting so long Kapadia just bored us silly - they didn't learn their lesson after the dreadful Hide And Seek and the horrible The Dark. The Return looks like a competent director was landed with an incompetent script.

Review by Gavin Burke