DVD review
Directed by Asif Kapadia
Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, Peter O’Brien, Sam Shepard, Adam Scott, Kate Beahan
Release date 21 May 2007

Ambitious rep Joanna Mills heads to a Texan town on business, and is plagued by visions that are somehow linked to her childhood…

British director Asif Kapadia appears to be under the misapprehension that The Return is a cerebral drama akin to Wild Strawberries, so seriously does he treat his subject matter. Yet even Ingmar Bergman had flashes of humour in his work; this confounding, emotionally dead supernatural mystery is likely to prove an endurance test for the most forgiving of horror fan.

The Grudge movies have obviously given Sarah Michelle Gellar a taste for slow-burning shockers. Although it takes influences from the genre, this one isn’t a ‘J-Horror’ remake, but it does manage the not unremarkable feat of being even more dismal than 2006’s The Grudge 2. Gellar is capable of more than squeaky clean vampire slaying as we saw from her cheerfully bitchy performance in Cruel Intentions, but she’s not an actress known for her dramatic weight. Here she fails to convince as the taciturn, troubled rep prone to self-harm, though the character of Joanna is so one-dimensional and pathologically humourless that even Meryl Streep would have struggled to make her interesting.

It’s impossible to believe the sleeve’s claim that the running time is just 85 minutes; it feels more like three days. An entirely tedious experience. James Skipp

VERDICT: 2/10
A funereal pace and a doom-laden soundtrack do not A Sixth Sense make.