Many supernatural horror tales make the audience wait for any sort of ‘big reveal’, opting to use sound design, blink-and-miss-it visuals and false starts, tantalising the viewers before offering up the big scares. This is not the case with The Return (2020), a film in which the opening scene plunges straight into a nightmarish childhood…dream? Recollection? In any case, it’s something finding its way into college student Rodger’s present, ahead of a trip back home; his father has lately died, and it’s down to Rodger, as the last living member of the immediate family, to tidy up his affairs. Alongside girlfriend Beth (Sara Thompson) and old friend/third wheel fit for a Penny Farthing, Jordan (Echo Porisky), Rodger (Richard Harmon) and the others head back to the old family home. Childhood trauma has been signposted strongly and early; it only remains to see how this will all play out.
Upon arriving at the old abode, a solicitor confirms with Rodger that his father has left him everything – the house is now his. To his great surprise, in the process of sifting through the house, Rodger uncovers a psychiatric evaluation from his childhood; he has no recollection of this, but it seems to have taken place around the time that his little sister Amelia died. The house has plenty of other oddities. Strange shadows, shadowy figures, and other phenomena which would have most people running for the hills – yet Rodger and co. are now more interested in filling in a backstory he never realised he had. At the funeral, Rodger realises that one of the attendees is the child psychiatrist named on his psych evaluation: he makes it his business to speak to this Dr. Roberta Cox (Marina Stephenson Kerr) in the hopes that she can help him to unravel a childhood which seems to have been littered with bereavement – his mother, too – and disappearances. It gets worse; it turns out that he had an imaginary friend at a young age – of whom he was absolutely terrified. All of this is unfolding as the ‘haunting’ (let’s call it that) grows increasingly intense and malignant.
The Return moves along at a largely steady pace for its first hour or so; realising, no doubt, that it has frontloaded its scares, it never bothers to try and hold back on them after this point: the manifestations are pretty full on, albeit that the figure which appears typically looks very…typical, all long black hair, long limbs and glowing eyes. This manifestation does shift its form at a later point, for reasons a little unclear, but it does at least add to the range of effects and scares on offer. By and large, the film dispenses with the kind of denouement which viewers may expect from a film seemingly choosing to take its aesthetics from other ghostly yarns. It shifts more into the mode of a mystery to solve, using a range of flashbacks, dreams, hypnosis and found footage (if hacking a computer file can really be classed as ‘found footage’). It is strange, though, just how well Rodger and his friends seem to take some pretty full-on phenomena; the old ‘thing glimpsed in the mirror’, for example, hardly raises an eyebrow, even when this is one loud, overt spectre. Even at its worst, Rodger seems to find it all more of a mild annoyance than a terrifying experience, even when it reaches its absolutely most serious.
There are some other decisions here which I found baffling; the whole girlfriend-plus-best friend trio feels like it goes easily awry, Rodger’s relationship with his girlfriend soon rendered down to a hastily-treated plot device. But it’s the presence of Jordan which both baffled me most and stretched the script to its absolute thinnest; I’ll not blame actress Echo Porisky for this, whom I’m sure is acting the part as written, but Jordan is a very strange character indeed. At first she seems extraneous, presumably meant to be light relief in some fashion as Beth and Rodger go their own way in their relationship. But her growing role in events as they unfold shifts her significance without making her more plausible, and urges more and more unlikely or unfathomable dialogue from her; when she makes Rodger promise not to leave her alone to face the house’s phenomena by herself, she does so by telling him, ‘if I take a dump, you’re coming to stinktown’. This, and other lines like it are a bizarre fit, to say the least.
So the film – batty dialogue and all – ticks over the hour mark, unfolding its mysteries in a timely way up to this point. We know there’s something terrifying and malign in the house; how the film attempts to distinguish itself from the old ‘unquiet spirit’ shtick is, to give it its due, ambitious. However, it necessitates a rapid increase in the exposition which both moves away from what has come before and yet matches it in just such an overblown style. The last thirty or so minutes of The Return might add a new dimension to the meaning behind the film’s title, but it all happens very fast and sacrifices clarity, veering wholesale into Bad Science in an effort to depart from Generic Ghosts. How you will feel about all of this will depend entirely on your reserves of patience for surprise endings and how busy you can take your last acts, though there is at least a nice, low-key last scene.
The Return seems to offer us a weighing-scales of sorts, with the heavy use of supernatural tropes at the beginning of the film eventually balanced against the film’s unexpected finale. There are issues here, but seeing out an about-face in the plot which at least shows ideas and drive is no bad thing I guess, seeing as this is a first feature by director and co-writer Bj Verot; some script edits and some reining-in of the sheer amount going on in any next venture would no doubt make his wealth of ideas read just a little clearer.
The Return (2020) will feature at the Blood in the Snow Festival. For more information, please click here.