The Return – Movie Review

90 Minutes, Not Rated

Written by Ken Janssens and BJ Verot

Directed by BJ Verot

Synopsis:

Rodger returns home from college with two friends to settle the affairs of his recently deceased father. They begin to experience weird and unsettling occurrences in the house. Rodger is soon plagued by strange childhood memories about a haunting by a ghostly presence. These memories boil over into reality culminating in an intense showdown with the terror that has come back.

Well, well, well…

Another “boy returns to childhood home and is confronted by supernatural events” movie.

Or is it?

The film spends a great deal of time using the tropes of classic horror to spin a web of paranoia and tension for the audience: dark rooms, weird noises, moving shadows, and even the occasional look at a ghostly, demonic, entity with seeming ill-intent (don’t they all seem to have ill-intent, though?)

And then…

Well, I would hate to spoil the surprise twist here, but it’s not one I would have called by the middle of the film. It’s an unusual move, not so much a twist as an evolution of the central motivation of the story.

And, though it’s a twist I am generally pre-disposed to nit-pick about, in this case, because of the unusual way the film-makers chose to implement of it, I’m going to overrule my explicit bias and allow it.

Now, does my acceptance of this move still cause problems, narratively speaking? Of course it does.

Just because I’ll allow a thing doesn’t mean I ignore a thing.

Duh.

The performances here are generally good, even if some of the dialogue lets the actors down at times.

The ending is a bit neat (as in tidy), but overall, The Return is a (surprisingly) enjoyable bit of horror/thriller/sci-fi fluff, which also kind of endears itself to my cinematic sensibilities.

Check it out.

The Return is currently available On Demand, from Uncork’d Entertainment.

The Return stars Richard Harmon, Sara Thompson, Echo Andersson, Marina Stephenson Kerr, Zoe Fish, Erik Athavale, and Gwendolyn Collins.

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