The Return

(2006) ***

Joanna Mills (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a travelling representative for a local trucking company, is great at her job. As the film begins we see her close a lucrative deal, landing a client that nobody else has been able to touch. Despite her success, Joanna is a loner. When she is not making deals for her job, she tends to keep to herself. Oh yeah, and since age 11 she has been engaging in self-mutilating behavior accompanigned by visions of a strange man who calls her “Sunshine.” Joanna, a Texas native, has stayed away from her hometown for many years and is estranged from her father. She agrees to return home briefly in order to potentially land a huge account. On route to Texas her strange visions increase. She begins having memories that do not appear to be her own and her car radio insists on playing an eerie Patsy Cline song over and over again. As she enters Texas, she stops at the scene of an accident, becomes disoriented, passes out, and awakes the next day without any evidence of said accident. Returning to her chilhood home Joanna stays the night and has an awkward conversation with her father who informs her that she was never the same after turning 11. Joanna flees and decides to stay in a hotel for the remainder of her trip. However, the longer she remains in Texas the more intense and specific her visions become. These visions involve a bar she has never been to and that pesky menacing man. Just what in the world is going on here?

Sarah Michelle Gellar crawls around like this a lot in The Return.

The Return is a cut above the usual horror tripe that gets released these days (e.g., Premonition). However, anyone who has spent any amount of time watching Japanese horror will be able to figure this one out, and aspects of J-Horror are liberally sprinkled throughout. Although The Return is hardly original, there are a few really good scares.