THE RETURN

Joanna Mills travels to Texas to finalize a sales contract for the company she works for. As soon as the girl sets foot again in those places where she spent her childhood, strange things start happening: her eyes suddenly change color, sometimes she doesn't recognize her reflection in the mirror, and she also has frequent visions of a woman she has never seen before. Convinced that she is somehow connected to her visions, Joanna begins to investigate and ventures as far as La Salle, a small country town, the homeland of the woman who populates her imagination, until she discovers that the same woman was murdered many years ago. But now the murderer seems to be interested in Joanna. American horror cinema seems to have finally understood the Eastern lesson by betting heavily on atmosphere and metaphysical-supernatural themes. In recent years, remakes of Eastern cult films have been succeeding at a worrying speed, and attempts like "Joanna Mills' Nightmare," where there is no attempt to mindlessly clone an already existing film, would be praised for the sole fact of being original works. But how can one praise a film like "Joanna Mills' Nightmare"? Let's start with a premise. "Joanna Mills' Nightmare" has two very important points in its favor: it draws inspiration from a theme that is not too original but interesting and underutilized by horror cinema (which will not be revealed here to avoid spoiling the surprise for those who haven't seen the film); it was made with very appreciable technical skill. Unfortunately, that's where it all stops, and even the theme around which the film revolves, in the end, has been poorly exploited. The pace that accompanies the film is decidedly too slow, almost soporific: the entire film is a long investigation by the protagonist trying to discover the reason for her visions, but there is no dynamism in her explorations and research; everything proceeds flatly, as if the entire story had been diluted in function of the final revelation. The same twist is rather predictable, and even the final explanation leaves more than a few doubts in the viewer's mind, probably due to some actual screenplay holes that do not allow everything to reassemble with too much interpretive logic. But the problem of the screenplay is not limited to the mere presence of scattered holes here and there, but one can also notice an excessive superficiality with which the various characters have been described. The protagonist, played by a brunette and disoriented Sarah Michelle Gellar ("Buffy"; "So What Did You Do?"), is a serious and dutiful girl who suddenly finds herself catapulted into a situation she does not understand. But the way she faces the difficulty does not seem very credible because, in the face of events that turn into the supernatural, her character finds herself reacting with an unnatural indifference, increased then by the really too detached performance of the actress. Better to draw a charitable veil over the co-protagonist Peter O'Brian ("Nightmares and Deliriums"), who plays a rough but big-hearted guy who has taken his companion for decades and not only is still tormented by the memory of the beloved, but at the time he was also accused of her death; a guy in the style of "Little House on the Prairie" who is embodied (poorly) by a too inexpressive actor. Equally forgettable is the "big bad" of the story, a redneck lacking any motivation/psychological delineation, played by J.C. McKenzie ("C.S.I.", "24"). The English director Asif Kapadia ("The Warrior") diligently performs the work on commission, undoubtedly helped by the suggestive and very suitable photography of Roman Osin, who manages to make the sunlit Texas countryside cold and unsettling, thanks to the use of cold and ashen colors. In short, a little film with the pace of a TV movie that can be easily forgotten right after viewing. Recommended if you suffer from insomnia.