The Return (2020)

(On Cable TV, May 2021) At first, The Return looks like a fairly traditional haunted-house thing — as a young man returns to his childhood home to clean it out after his father’s death and bizarre things start happening to him and the two women who accompany him (one is his girlfriend; you won’t be surprised to learn that the other wants to be. ). There’s plenty of spookiness to go around, and if the scary beats aren’t exactly new, writer-director B J Verot makes decent use of a small budget in creating an atmosphere. Then there’s the last-act genre shift into Science Fiction (which can be safely predicted by the fact that the protagonist is brilliant, his parents were scientists and there’s a whiteboard filled with equations earlier in the film) that either feels daring or redundant depending on your tolerance for genre-blending. It’s not quite a case of genre rug-pulling considering that the SF bits are announced well in advance, and the horror intention of The Return doesn’t really let up. Still, it does give an impression of a film that blends its elements to puree without considering if they actually go well together. There’s a more serious charge to be made about the film’s languid pacing that pushes back nearly everything interesting in the last act (perhaps out of a misguided attempt to keep the genre twist for as long as possible). The bigger problem with a Science Fictional twist is that it opens up the story into possibilities that seem under-exploited. If you’re going to throw time travel in your haunted house story (and The Return is far from the first to go there), then the possibilities of the story multiply, and so do the promising story points left unused. While The Return does have a slight low-budget horror appeal, it’s ultimately disappointing in how it chooses to develop its early moments. Not terrible, but not that good and ultimately a bit bland because of its slowness, despite an unusual side jump into SF.