Sarah Michelle Gellar

"The Return is a slow burn that’s often way too slow, feeling stretched to meet a running time that’s still under 90 minutes."

What if David Lynch directed the next Grudge sequel? Besides being totally awesome, it might look something like the completely bizarre, sometimes fascinating, often infuriating Sarah Michelle Gellar flick The Return. Perhaps it’s because The Return is directed by a director not from Japan or Korea, Asif Kapadia (from England), but it feels unlike a lot of the cookie-cutter genre contributions we’ve seen in 2006. The problem is that what separates The Return from movies like The Grudge 2 is also what’s likely to drive standard horror fans crazy. Kapadia has come into a genre known for cheap scares and consistent action and delivered a slow, bizarre ghost story where there is no haunted house or creepy children with long black hair. Will fans run in terror or stay to see how the mystery plays out?

The Return opens with a childhood version of our heroine, Joanna Mills, at a carnival with her father (Sam Shepard). She’s unusually frightened - although I must admit that state fairs creep me out, too - and, in a moment of terror as a man she thinks is going to harm her approaches her hiding place at the carnival, Joanna cuts herself. Flash forward and the adult Joanna (Sarah Michelle Gellar) hasn’t gone back to Texas since. (We all know Texas is haunted.) So, eventually, she returns to the haunted state on business and to see her best friend and father and before you can say "Oh, that’s why it’s called The Return," really weird stuff starts to happen. She’s driving down the street when all radio stations and her CD player turn to the same line from the same song and she stumbles across a ghostly accident. She goes out with her friend and has something of a dream vision where she’s in another bar, one that’s bathed in red, and she walks into a phone booth and cuts herself again. She sees other faces in the mirror and hears phantom footsteps. Then a midget speaks backwards. OK, that doesn’t happen, but, at least for a while, it feels like it could.

After the bizarre set-up, The Return turns into one of those ’what the hell is going on?’ entries in the genre, more like The Skeleton Key than the straight-up horror that most of the genre has produced lately in films like Saw III or The Descent. Who is the man that Joanna keeps seeing in her visions? Why does she know so much about this town she’s never been to? When will Sarah finally make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie? The answers to most of the questions come a little too easily and require a few too many horror cliches to get there, but Kapadia bathes the thing in a moody enough horror atmosphere to keep most viewers interested.

The problem is in the way that Rogue is advertising The Return. People are going to buy tickets thinking that this is another Grudge-style flick and find something closer to a drama, leaving them frustrated at the lack of honest scares or jumps. The Return is a slow burn that’s often way too slow, feeling stretched to meet a running time that’s still under 90 minutes. People coming off the punch to the gut that is Saw III and even after seeing the over-the-top previews for Hostel: Part II and Turistas are likely to drift off to sleep while watching The Return. And when they wake, the movie’s weird enough that they might not be sure they’re not dreaming. The Return has enough going for it to recommend for fans of ghost stories, but might have been better served to be adapted into a great episode of Masters of Horror instead of a feature-length film. We all know there’s nothing scarier than boredom.