Sarah Michelle Gellar

Gellar’s Return won’t hold Grudge crowd

You’re a distributor and you’re trying to sell a slow-moving supernatural mystery with Sarah Michelle Gellar, no body count to speak of and very little blood. What do you do?

If you’re the folks behind The Return, you slap Gellar’s scared face all over the trailer, toss in every other jumpy-scary scream-cut and include an incongruous creepy kid shot.

And you don’t show it to critics or anyone else who could warn people The Return is not The Grudge 3. But that goes without saying in the scary movie genre these days.

Fact is, things could get ugly if the wrong crowd comes to The Return and sits an hour-plus before there’s even the slightest hint of what’s going on, why Buffy keeps having bad dreams, which woman’s face keeps showing up in the mirror and why we keep hearing the first few bars of Patsy Cline singing Sweet Dreams.

On the other hand, if you are in the mood for an old- fashioned ghost story, in which a murder is solved so the dead can rest (think What Lies Beneath), The Return is a passable, moderately-stylish time-waster with fewer ridiculous moments than you’d expect from a movie where Gellar (all five-foot-zero of her in heels) is a travelling salesperson hawking industrial truck-transport contracts to beefy Texans.

Director Asif Kapadia has a flair for already overused neo-horror film conventions (he’s in love with starkly lit dream sequences that look like the video scenes in The Ring).

Writer Adam Sussman commits the cardinal mystery-movie sin of withholding a key piece of information until the penultimate scene, robbing viewers of the fun of properly putting the pieces together and solving things themselves.

But Gellar’s quietly-sincere intensity often succeeds in distracting you from the movie’s shortcomings.

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THE RETURN

What: Thriller directed by Asif Kapadia

Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Peter O’Brien and Sam Shepard

Classification: 14A

Where: Rainbow Cinemas, Galleria London (519-434-3073); Westmount 6 Cinemas, 785 Wonderland Rd. (519-474-2152)

Rating: 2 out of 5