A stirring Ralph Fiennes prevents The Return from being a failed Odyssey

This close-cropped cinematography is a great choice when focused on Fiennes, who sells The Return’s dour presentation. He oscillates between jubilation over finally being home, squeezing dirt between his fingers, and despair over what he’s lost. There’s a perpetual haunted distance to the performance that captures Odysseus’ survivor’s guilt from returning alone, and as he tenses his muscles at the suitors’ provocations, we can see he’s trying to avoid repeating the brutal acts that he deeply regrets. While the concept of a grimdark Odysseus, stripped of his mischievous guile and left only with bottled masculine rage, could have come across as overbearingly macabre, the nuance of Fiennes’ performance gives this portrayal additional depth, even if the movie’s generally morbid presentation still doesn’t always land.

That said, it certainly helps that the band of suitors who plague him are diabolical in compelling ways, and while only Marwan Kenzari’s Antinous has a similar degree of well-rounded heft, the rest of this band are viscerally despicable. There’s Tom Rhys Harries as a sociopathic Pisander, whose icy cold gaze and unpredictability add tension to every scene he’s in, and Jamie Andrews Cutler’s brutish Polybus, who kills with little recourse. They murder and steal without compunction as their nonchalant cruelty further amplifies The Return’s bleak tone while providing a worthwhile foil for our guilt-stricken king.

This all leads to the main conflict, one that makes the best use of these ruminations on PTSD and lingering wartime trauma: Odysseus is plagued by his previous acts of violence and seems reluctant to repeat them, even against the suitors destroying Ithaca. We know how The Odyssey ends, with the hero slaughtering the suitors to the last man, even killing the maids who fraternized with them, and that seemingly inevitable conclusion hangs over the film. 

In The Return, Odysseus is so distraught over the Trojan War that his struggles to get back to Penelope are internal instead of external, and he’s terrified that the things he’s done have left him unrecognizable. It’s a well-explored riff on the character that comes to a head in a somewhat disturbing climax that doubles down on the general absence of heroism in this telling. Here, killing is just killing.

And yet, John Collee, Edward Bond, and Pasolini’s screenplay fails to resolve its most grandiose questions. Penelope asks her husband, “Why do men go to war?” There isn’t much answer here, and the film ends on a turn that feels entirely out of place—one that retroactively diminishes its attempted explorations on the nature of violence. But even if the ending perfectly tied everything together, the movie’s moroseness doesn’t connect, occasionally becoming tedious. While The Return only partially succeeds at reframing Homer through the lens of anti-war cinema, some excellent performances ensure it doesn’t get as lost as its central hero.

Director: Uberto Pasolini
Writers: John Collee, Edward Bond, Uberto Pasolini
Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Charlie Plummer, Marwan Kenzari
Release Date: December 6, 2024