There have been plenty of films that have mined the stories of Odysseus, often concentrating on the more iconic adventures of his youth, his travails in Troy, and other elements considered worthy for such a mythologically resonant heroic figure. What sets The Return apart, as the title suggests, is that it strips the man from the earlier exploits, crafting a deeply humanist, and in turn deeply effective, portrait of a man in the final chapters of the grand story of his life. Directed by Uberto Pasolini (Still Life), the majority of the film rests upon the shoulders of two key characters. We first see a man stripped of all his glory, literally. Naked on a beach, washed to shore and bleeding from various contusions, he appears to be at death’s door lying there baking in the sun. He’s soon rescued by a local slave farmer who helps bring him back to health, who regales his patient with stories about the corruption that has beset the island of Ithaca in the absence of its king.

What Is ‘The Return’ About?
The man, of course, is Odysseus, played with striking ferocity and physicality by Ralph Fiennes. He hears of the many suitors that have arrived to try and take the crown, waiting their turn to woo the queen when she finally comes to terms that her husband should be presumed dead. Just as Fiennes’ sinewy turn is one of the film’s most delightful surprises, the effortless, seeming ageless beauty of Juliette Binoche anchors her pitch-perfect portrayal of Penelope, a traditionally two-dimensional character who here is given so much more thanks to the fierce, unspoken thoughts the actress reflects with her expressive eyes and darting movements. Their son, Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) is shown to be flighty and unforgiving, but soon even he is caught up in the machinations of these challenges for the throne. More than simply resting upon the relatively straightforward narrative of the thousands-of-years-old source material, the script by John Collee, Edward Bond, and Pasolini manages to balance both the classicist elements as well as more contemporary psychosocial and political motivations.

With a sun-dabbled island location and claustrophobic caves shot with precision by Romanian cinematographer Marius Paduru, the hardscrabble landscape matches elegantly with the creases of worry and fatigue played on the canvas of Fiennes’ face. So many of the reactions by both Odysseus and Penelope are exercises in tortured restraint, culminating in a scene where the beggar-figure and queen circle each other like a waltz, only to have the smallest of cues and piercing glances to provide the deeper subtext to the words actually uttered.

Thus, when the film finally does explode into more chaotic and violent moments, the contrast is all the more satisfying. The challenge throughout is for us to find commonality with such arch characters, themselves so fundamental to our very concept of storytelling that it’s hard to find freshness in the telling. It’s a credit to the storytelling as well as these extraordinary performers that we’re drawn into their world as if we’re there to witness, never feeling the distance of time, while never appearing patronizingly contemporary in the form of a revision.

‘The Return’ Is All About Building Tension
Image via TIFF

The Return, in ways both gentle and overt, draws back the bow of tension until it’s finally released, culminating in a way that’s less cathartic, and more the feeling of inevitability. There are even times when the very mythmaking of the king’s Odyssey is interrogating, making sense of grander mythological events with the benefit of the more muted telling by a witness and participant. It’s this stripping away of most pretense, be it the trappings of the royal household or the more literary exuberances that differing tellings may have injected, that gives the events we ourselves witness that much more power.

With bold performances, a strong vision for the source material, and a wise decision to focus on this under-represented portion of this narrative, The Return makes for an effective character piece that proves these stories are not only timeless, they’re as timely as ever.

The Return had its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.