The sad-hued minimilistic beauty of Russian Cinema is brilliantly displayed in this lonely modern ode to the human family and the ties that unbind it. Looking like a Blue-Periodesque Picasso come to life, and appearing as modern mythological ethos, we are left here with a feeling of regret and questions unanswered and/or unanswerable.
          The story is archetype: two brothers are reunited with their twelve-year estranged father and are taken on a road trip by the returning papa in order to (what?) become a family again? (who knows). The boys are pampered and weak and the father is brutish and tough and of course things don't go along happily (but, this is a Russian Film after all). What we get is a slow-paced descent into the wilderness (both figuratively and literally, as well as psychologically).
          As the journey continues, the younger boy gets pathologically further apart from his new-found father as the older brother seems to edge closer (albeit trepidatously) then further then closer then further apart. **SPOILER WARNING** It's only in the end, after inevitable tragedy strikes, that we see a love for a long lost father come booming forth in a quiet thud of unexpected recognition for both boys. We do see, earlier on, a look of love or two as the father watches his boys quickly grow into manhood. This is a man that does love these boys even though he probably doesn't even understand what love really is.
          And in the end, these boys are different (for both good and bad). At the start they were boys, by the end, men (in the most primal old Russian way of course). **MORE SPOILER COMING** When the boys escape (alone) the island wilderness that their world has shattered upon, it is not the two soft boys that we meet playing at the films opening, but instead two men, made that way in just five days time with a father they hardly knew. Was this his goal all along? or was he just as scared as they were all along?
          Captured in a beautifully melancholy light of Russian despair, the Return (winner of Best First Film and The Golden Lion at Venice in 2003) marks a stunning entrance into the Cinematic foreground for Andrey Zvyagintsev, an Auteur (and heir apparent) of the grand mystic realm of Tarkovsky.