The Return

The hurt and rage flying back and forth have primal power, like Russian-flavored Eugene O'Neill. It's rare for a movie to work as effectively as this one does on such parallel tracks. Read full review

Constructed like an eerie, metaphorical thriller, this tense, riveting character study offers viewers nearly two hours of emotions with a stunning pay-off no one will be expecting. Read full review

With exceptional performances and extraordinary imagery, Zvyagintsev has fashioned a remarkable first feature. Read full review

Still, it never quite realizes the oneiric quality because, paradoxically, of its best achievement--the performances of the two boys. They are vital, insistent. Their beings contradict the dreaminess and make us ask the questions mentioned above. Read full review

Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title. Read full review

At once a powerful psychological thriller and a haunting allegory, The Return marks an auspicious feature debut for helmer Andrey Zvyagintsev. Read full review

Enriched by allusions to biblical stories of fathers, sons, and sacrifices, subtly woven into the movie's moodily photographed fabric. Read full review

At once highly naturalistic and dreamily abstract, playing out its mythic themes through vibrantly detailed characterizations (and remarkable performances by the entire cast). The Return announces the arrival of a major new talent. Read full review

A haunting, melancholy work. Read full review

Vladimir Garin and Ivan Dobronravov are amazingly natural as the boys, and Konstantin Lavronenko impresses as the taciturn father. Read full review

Actor-turned-director Andrey Zvyagintsev's feature debut is haunted by an elusive past and suffused with dread about the future, and it's all suggestion without explanation. Read full review

Can be interpreted politically or even biblically or not at all, as the elemental struggles between dominance and submission, impulse and action, man and nature, father and son, play out to their stunning conclusion. Read full review

The true mystery is the journey itself, which will turn out to be one of the most spiritually enervating, and elevating, Outward Bound courses ever undertaken. Read full review

While most films are fortunate if they succeed on any level, The Return works easily on several, making as powerful a mark emotionally as it does visually and even allegorically. Yet the film so catches you up in its compelling story, you're almost not aware of how masterful a piece of cinema you're watching. Read full review

A film that asks its audience to invest serious thought, and in return, bestows serious pleasure.

Unfortunately, the reach of The Return exceeds its grasp, and so this film of gruffly beautiful images didn't put a hook in me the way Zvyagintsev so ardently seems to want it to. [March 2003, p. 27]

Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal. Read full review

It is the first film to be directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, and what it shares with other coruscating débuts, from “The Four Hundred Blows” to “Badlands,” is a sense that it HAD to be made. There is a controlled wildness at the heart of such movies, whose narratives ask to be handled as delicately as explosives. [15 March 2004, p. 154]

A tense, expertly acted Russian film clouded by its intentional ambiguity. Read full review

In its dramatic shift from the real to the allegorical, the ending of Andrey Zvyagintsev's auspicious debut feature The Return is likely to leave many viewers scratching their heads. Read full review

The Russian film The Return is a stunning contemporary fable about a divided family in the wilderness - a simple, riveting film that almost achieves greatness. Read full review

Beautifully structured and emotionally wrenching. Read full review

It is a Kafkaesque story, in which ominous things follow one another with a certain internal logic but make no sense at all. Read full review

Strip away the portentous style and lush views of nature in The Return and all you've got is a slender nightmare of a family gone haywire in an outing that turns into survival camp. Read full review

A haunting Russian art film with the economy of a thriller. Read full review

It's not the sort of film one can be said to enjoy, but it is the sort of film that has the clarity of a dream and lingers for hours. Read full review

Many questions remain purposely unanswered: Where was the father for 12 years? Why did he want to go away with the kids? What's in a box he finds hidden in the island? Yet, in a remarkable ending, the boys discover their feelings. Read full review

This is nobody's idea of a happy family story, but it is a pristinely chilling depiction of familial meltdown in a post-Stalinist, Twilight Zone anti-place, the dark heart of heartlessness and mysterious parenting techniques. Read full review

Garin’s performance is just one of the note-perfect elements in The Return -- unfussy acting, unhurried direction, sublime cinematography and low-key music -- which conspire to draw the audience into a deceptively simple story with numerous hidden depths. Read full review

Oh, it's The Return, all right. To any masochist who's been pining for all those clichéd tropes associated with Russian cinema -- ponderous pacing and arcane symbolism shot through a lens darkly -- this will seem a welcome blast from the past. Read full review