No fun going back

Reviewed - The Return:ASIF Kapadia, director of the singular Anglo-Asian drama The Warrior, has launched his Hollywood career with a skilfully made but dreadfully dull exercise in Texan gothic.

Being a highbrow sort of chap, Asif probably holds to the snooty view that sombre atmosphere and brooding apprehension - rather than decapitation and disembowelment - are what makes for effective horror. Well, fair enough. But you have to give the viewer some sort of pay-off. The Return, which again fails to turn Sarah Michelle Gellar into Fay Wray, is made of nothing but unease and foreboding. It is one sluggish, interminable first act stretched out to feature length.

Gellar, so much less fun since she gave up slaying vampires, stars as a sales representative for a transport firm who, overcoming certain unspoken childhood traumas, returns home to Texas to secure a contract. Once there, in between unhappy visions, she finds herself menaced by a dangerous man from her past and assisted by a stereotypically handsome stranger. Another face, not her own, stares out from the mirror. The radio consistently plays Crazy by Patsy Cline. And so forth.

Since nothing seems quite real in this boringly monotone world, it is very hard to get worked up by the supposed threat from the various lurking oiks. It soon becomes clear that Gellar is doomed to undergo an unhappy trauma foreshadowed both by airy visions and more substantial recollections of earlier disasters. The film is, in that sense, a little like an austerely sober episode in the Final Destination franchise. In those pictures, the film-makers did, at least, have the decency to stage the odd beheading. No such fun here.