The Return

Director Uberto Pasolini’s slow-burning adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey reunites The English Patient stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche for a film grounded in a classical style that captures the steeliness of the Greek epic, where gazes are locked tight and every breath and word is measured.

The Return picks up as Odysseus (Fiennes, also at the Festival in Conclave) washes onto the shores of Ithaca. It has been more than 20 years since he left his kingdom to fight in the Trojan War and, in all that time, his wife and queen Penelope (Binoche) has waited. Their son, Telemachus (Charlie Plummer), has lost faith that his father will return and worries for his mother’s safety as a group of increasingly unruly suitors pressure her to take one of them as the new king.

Barely recognizable to himself or to the people who once revered him as a mighty warrior, Odysseus slowly makes his way toward the castle, seeing what has become a desolate island in his absence. With tension growing, Penelope works on weaving a red quilt, promising that she’ll choose a suitor once it’s finished. It becomes a symbol of all the little ways she keeps holding on. When Odysseus finally enters the fray, Penelope puts forth an iconic and instantly recognizable test for her weakened king to prove himself true among a viper’s nest of men lusting for power.

Content advisory: violence