The Return Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

The Return Blu-ray Movie Review

Back Where It Came From

Reviewed by Michael Reuben September 11, 2014

After actress Sarah Michelle Gellar concluded her career-defining seven-year run on television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she seemed to go out of her way to change her image. She turned down several leading roles that might have drawn on the heroic connotations of her iconic character and seemed to relish playing people who were more fragile (though never damsels in distress). Whatever the artistic satisfaction these projects might have provided, most of them were not box office hits. (I am not counting 2004's sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, which no doubt resulted from prior contractual obligations.) Only The Grudge (2004) and its sequel (2006) drew a significant audience.

The Return was the U.S. film debut of Anglo-Indian director Asif Kapadia, who has since become better known for the excellent documentary Senna about the Brazilian racing champion. In both theme and style, the film often has the feel of a Japanese horror remake like The Grudge, but in fact it is based on an original script by Adam Sussman, a writer on the short-lived 2005 remake of the TV series The Night Stalker . As in Buffy, Gellar plays a young woman who has been "chosen" for an unusual destiny, but here her "gifts" are not strength, agility and a calling to fight evil but an uncontrollable stream of frightening images, dreams and memories that aren't hers and that she doesn't understand. As a result, she becomes estranged from family, friends, co-workers and, ultimately, herself.

The central figure in The Return is Joanna Mills, played by Gellar in the present and by Darrian McClanahan as an eleven-year-old. We first see Joanna as a little girl accompanying her father, Ed, to a local Texas fair. (Ed Mills is played by Sam Shepard, whom Gellar named to the film's producers as her first choice to play her father, never dreaming that he would accept the role.) Joanna has a massive bruise on her forehead, which her father explains is the result of a recent car accident. Wandering off on her own, Joanna becomes terrified when she sees a man following her and calling her "Sunshine". She hides, until her agitated father finds her. There is no sign of the man.

In the present, Joanna is a successful sales rep for a trucking company based in St. Louis, who is known for two things: being a "closer" and avoiding assignments in Texas. She keeps to herself, has scars from incidents of self-mutilation and has to deal with a failed office romance with Kurt (Adam Scott), who won't accept that the relationship is over. When a sales opportunity in Texas arises that's too good to pass up, Joanna pursues it, but the trip unleashes a new wave of dreams and hallucinations, including a nightmare about entering a bar she doesn't recognize and the persistent sound of Patsy Cline singing "Sweet Dreams".

Joanna's effort to piece together clues from her dreams and visions are the primary narrative of The Return, which has been criticized for its deliberate pace. But Kapadia is going for an atmosphere of dread as Joanna battles for control over her own mind and life, rather than a mystery that the audience may or may not be able to solve before Joanna does. Indeed, many viewers may have grasped the broad outlines of Joanna's predicament long before the film's climactic confrontation. Joanna's visit to her estranged father, who tells her that she became "a different girl" at age eleven, and her encounter with a mysteriously taciturn cowboy named Terry Stahl (Peter O'Brien, X-Men Origins: Wolverine ), who has a dark past, are essential clues. To reveal any more would be to spoil whatever surprises The Return may hold.

Kapadia makes the most out of the spare Texas landscape, and he's made the interesting and increasingly uncommon choice to move Joanna in and out of her hallucinatory states without necessarily signaling the change with visual transitions, such as slow motion or dramatic shifts in lighting. For her part, Gellar brings to Joanna the impressive emotional transparency that has always been one of her gifts as an actor, especially when playing grief or fear. (In one of his Buffy commentaries, series creator Joss Whedon observed that Gellar never had trouble crying for a scene, but that she always struggled when a script required laughter.)

In an interesting example of casting against type, J.C. MacKenzie, who usually plays nerdy professionals, appears as a redneck grease monkey, who doesn't know Joanna but turns out to have crucial information about why she seems to be experiencing someone else's life.

The Return Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Return was shot on film by German cinematographer Roman Osin, who has lensed several other films for Kapadia and is probably best known for his work on Joe Wright's 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice. Post-production was completed on a digital intermediate, from which Universal's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced, so that any issues of densities, black levels or sharpness, and grain reduction (if any), goes back to choices made by the director and/or DP at the DI stage, in consultation with the DI colorist.

As is almost always the case with DI-completed projects, the Blu-ray image is reliably sharp and detailed, admirably conveying Osin's brooding portrayal of Joanna's world, which rarely brightens, even under the Texas sun. More often than not, the brightest lights and richest hues turn out to be part of a hallucination or a vivid memory that is not Joanna's. With a few exceptions, such as the outdoor fair at the beginning, the film's palette is consistently dark and and faded, matching both the landscape and Joanna's internal state. Despite the darkness, however, shadow detail is readily visible, and Joanna's surroundings can always be seen, even if they're not really "hers".

Although The Return runs only 85 minutes, Universal has placed it on a BD-50, allowing for a generous average bitrate of 34.10 Mbps. If only every studio would adopt such a sensible practice with their catalog titles.

The Return Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Return's original 5.1 track is encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, and it's a moody mix with an involving sense of various locales—the fair, Joanna's office, the open road late at night, a rowdy bar—and subtle shifts that accompany Joanna's withdrawal into her interior world. Kapadia and his sound team avoid using effects to say "Boo!" and make the audience jump; instead, they use it to create a sense of unease, so that when Joanna sees something upsetting, you're already on edge. The brooding score by Dario Marianelli (an Oscar winner for Atonement) makes a critical contribution to the unsettling mood.

The Return Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Universal's 2007 DVD of The Return. As has become typical of Universal catalog DVDs, the disc has no main menu, and the extras must be accessed from a pop-up menu during playback.

• Making of The Return (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 8:32): This short piece on the making of the film features interviews with Gellar, Kapadia, writer Sussman and producers Aaron Ryder and Jeffrey Silver. Spoilers abound, and it should not be watched until after viewing the film. The alert viewer will note both from comment in the featurette and from the "alternate ending" (see below) that the film's script and basic premise clearly underwent revision during shooting and editing.



• Deleted Scenes (480i; 2:35:1; 10:42): The six scenes are not separately listed. They are primarily additional "beats" that are interesting but not essential to the story.



• Alternate Ending (480i; 2:35:1; 5:41): Promoted on the Blu-ray (and DVD) covers as "too shocking for the big screen", what is most shocking about this alternate ending is how anyone ever imagined it would work. (I can't explain further without giving away too much.)

The Return Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Expectations play a big part in the response to a film, and The Return undoubtedly suffered from being marketed to horror fans, probably to capitalize on Gellar's recent successes in The Grudge and its sequel. Anyone coming to The Return expecting something similar will be disappointed. Kapadia has crafted a brooding thriller that hovers between a ghost story and a mystery about buried secrets. If the film has a weakness, it's that it ends too soon. After investing so much time and energy into the unraveling of the plot, one would like to know a little more about what happens after everything has been revealed. As for the Blu-ray, it's a fine presentation and, on that basis, recommended.