The Return

The Return (2006)

Directed by: Asif Kapadia
Written by: Adam Sussman
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Peter O'Brien, J.C. McKenzie, Kate Beahan, Adam Scott, Erinn Allison, Frank Ertl, Sam Sheperd

See, I was really confused about this movie because I thought it was a sequel to something. I have to stop this, I really do. It can't go on.

In this particular little party, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a woman who keeps having visions of another woman's murder and has to find out what happened before she gets killed by the murderer. Meanwhile, she has a thing with the dead woman's boyfriend/husband (!).

All shot in grey so that you almost think it's in black and white. It is secretly in colour however. It was kind of cool looking, though.

And man does Sarah Michelle look... old... er. I mean, she's only thirty, but I'll always think of her as a peppy, 20-year old blond (apparently she's really a brunette, but I don't believe it). She almost looked like a different person in this.

Anyway, back to the movie, which was kind of... mediocre. It wasn't terrible, but it didn't really do jack for me.

There were a couple of scenes which were pretty spooky (particularly one scene in which Sarah Michelle Gellar moves a sweater or something off of her mirror and sees another woman's reflection in it - would have been more interesting had I not seen it in The Eye), and it was generally atmospheric, but I kept thinking of Carnival of Souls (the one with the woman who survives a weird car crash and keeps hearing weird music on her radio and there's this guy who's following her around who may or may not be real, and there's a mysterious death...), which I liked better. It was scarier.

And God damnit, what is it with Texas? (You couldn't really tell it was Texas - it wasn't shot in that washed out, borderline-sepia tone, grainy, scratchy way that everything set in Texas is shot. Kind of original, really). It's either Texas or Japan, I guess.

This could easily have been set in Japan. I don't think it's even based on a Japanese film, but it might as well be (it's sort of got a ghost in it after all). Or maybe that's just the lingering residue of The Grudge hanging about Sarah Michelle Gellar and setting off my detectors.

But anyway, the final explanation of the whole thing wasn't very satisfactory. It was kind of stupid, actually - while the dying woman was being driven to the hospital by her boyfriend/husband, they hit the back of a station wagon containing the child version of Sarah Michelle Gellar and the dying woman's soul goes into the little girl. Good thing it didn't go into Sam Sheperd.

END TRANSMISSION