The Return review – skirts on the am-dram

This story of a rumpled beggarman who washes up at sea and eventually transforms into someone who looks to be shooting their shot at a local bodybuilding expo is the type of screen vehicle you’d expect to see Jean Claude van Damme leaping on in the 1990s. Yet Uberto Pasolini’s The Return is a little different, as you have arch thesp Ralph Fiennes as that beggarman, very much proving that he can get ripped to order. Plus, this is a story adapted from elements of Homer’s antiquarian page-turner, ‘The Odyssey’, the scholastic standard text that even Christopher Nolan is now taking a hoof at.

Early reviews of the film from its premiere at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival have compared its patient dramaturgy and line-readings to Shakespeare in tone and mood, and you can imagine how that leap is being made with the Bard’s favourite son in the lead role. And yet, there’s something quite free and pure about this adaptation, with an unblinking, era-specific treatment of the male form which echoes films like Derek Jarman’s experimental Biblical saga, Sebastiane.

Fiennes is Odysseus, the once-mighty warrior who fought in the Trojan War and who now finds himself in his homeland of Ithaca after 20 years away. His wife and queen Penelope (Juliette Binoche) sits in her cloister, frantically weaving on her loom, all the better to deal with the fact she’s being constantly hectored by nobles, politicians and local strongmen to take a new husband and allow male power to rule the roost once more. Yet rather than dive right back into the fray to re-claim his throne, Odysseus hangs back to get a measure of things, and first rekindles a relationship with his estranged son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer), circling his prey before being handed the opportunity for poetic and brutal retribution.

The first hour of the film lays out the sociopolitical context in a way that’s not massively exciting from a dramatic vantage, with lots of harried conversations occurring in leafy woodland clearings. Yet as the focus shifts onto Fiennes, matters begin to heat up, reaching a fiery pinnacle when he and Binoche finally share the frame. Some of the heinous thugs are a little one-note, and Plummer really does not work in this role, particularly when he’s scene partner with his generally more imposing co-stars.

Yet from its slow build-up comes a rousing finale, with Penelope setting an impossible feat of strength and agility as the benchmark for her new marriage material (as it should be!). Pasolini has made a name for himself as a maker of solid, if not-quite-exceptional social realist dramas, such as 2013’s Still Life and 2020’s Nowhere Special, and this one proves that there’s definitely another string to his bow in terms of his interests and abilities as a screen storyteller.