The Return

I rented this movie because it seemed like it would be one of those Asian horror movies wrapped up in American cinema packaging. It definitely wasn’t what I expected, but it was still a pretty good movie.

The Return is about Joanna Mills (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a young traveling saleswoman who has nightmares and waking dreams about a place she doesn’t remember ever being and a woman she's never met being murdered. Her life is falling apart, with her paranoia interfering with her job and her obsessive ex-boyfriend stalking her. While traveling for work, she finds herself near the town she is dreaming about, and decides to try and track down what it is she is dreaming and who murdered the woman she sees in her dreams. She befriends a man named Terry, who is somehow linked to the murder. Did he kill the woman in her dreams? Is the killer stalking her? Why is she having the dreams at all?

Sarah Michelle Gellar feels a little young for the role, but it’s not too bad. The atmosphere was dreary and stark, and perfect for a mystery. There were some real scares there, and the pacing was good once you get past the weird boyfriend showing up out of nowhere.

Overall, I was disappointed in some of the cuts to the film; I watched the deleted scenes and thought to myself – oh, now I get why that guy was even in the story at all. I know why they made the cuts they did, they wanted to speed the film up, but I really feel the movie suffered for it. I think that this movie would have performed much better in theaters if it had been marketed as the movie it actually is – a mystery/thriller, rather than an Asian horror rip-off. I was pleasantly surprised. As a thriller, it was good; as a horror movie, it lacked.

Rating: 4 Purrs for a surprising thriller in a pretend Asian horror package