Taking on a film adaptation of a text as Epic as The Odyssey is no small feat. The director of The Return (2024) Umberto Pasolini seemed well aware of this and was wise in his choice to adapt only a small section of Homer’s ancient Greek text for the screen. Focusing solely on Odysseus’s return to his home island Ithaca after 20 years of absence – spent fighting in the Trojan War (on the winning side) for ten years and then another ten trying to make his way back home – The Return omits any and all supernatural and divine elements of The Odyssey and instead attempts to portray a deeply human story.
The humanity of the film is realised in the unsurprisingly excellent lead performances from Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as Odysseus and Penelope. The two actors reunite on this project more than 25 years after working together on the epic, war drama The English Patient (1996). Their chemistry and yearning is palpable in The Return, but they do all the heavy lifting in terms of acting. With the exception of Claudio Santamaria as Eumaeus, most of the other performances, by the younger cast especially, are not particularly well executed.
Several line deliveries and much of the dialogue intended to be emotionally charged frequently feels amateurish, awkward and disengaging to the audience. The ineptitude of these performances is further exposed by the film’s unnecessarily long duration which creates a rather dragged out and unintriguing plot; this could (and should) have easily been a 90 minute feature rather than 120. It seems having an inexperienced director (Pasolini has worked as a successful producer for many years) direct seemingly inexperienced actors did not bode well for this film, despite the presence of an acting great like Ralph Fiennes on set to guide the younger actors.
There was a visible lack of confidence in Charlie Plummer’s performance as son of Odysseus and Penelope, Telemachus. There are a few instances where his acting talent does shine through, but it would seem the absence of a strong directorial presence and convincing script prevented his abilities from manifesting on screen.
Pasolini’s failure to fully deliver as a film director is a great shame, for as he explained in a Q&A after a screening of The Return at the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival – where I first saw the film – he dedicated an immense amount of time and research to this project. He started writing the script over thirty years ago! Hearing him talk firsthand about the project, his passion and knowledge of The Odyssey, its themes and the longevity of it’s literary, social and cultural relevance is remarkable.
Pasolini clearly spent all this time streamlining what aspects of the text he wanted to represent in his film, but seeing the completed project one can’t help but feel his intentions become largely misguided and muddled. In the hands of another more experienced film director, perhaps Pasolini’s vision and ambitions would have been better realised and a more engaging and convincing piece could have been delivered.
That being said, The Return does leave some things to be admired. The way in which the characters are composed within the film’s spaces should be commended for their visually-pleasing aesthetic and narrative contribution. These character compositions resemble those in the work of filmmaking greats like Kurosawa and Paolo Pasolini (of no relation to Umberto) and are best exemplified in many of the shots from inside the castle grounds where Penelope’s suitors are residing.
The crew on this film made effective use of the fore, middle and background to create layers and attractive character compositions that often parallel the character dynamics – there’s almost always a suitor or two lurking in the background of a shot in the same way that Penelope feels they are lurking in her ‘back-yard’; palace grounds.
The cinematography and use of the physical landscape in The Return is also well executed, in particular the film’s devised visuality and aesthetic. With the calming beauty of the sun-soaked Mediterranean island of Ithaca serving as a visual contrast to the rugged, scar-covered and aged Odysseus and the subsequent violence which unfolds as he enacts his revenge.
While disappointing in terms of well-rounded acting and plot intrigue and progression, the most interesting aspect of The Return is its underlying, but thematically most important, exploration of the psychological impact of war. As someone who is well-versed in the impact of mass psychological trauma and PTSD amongst soldiers, and the links between war trauma and ancient Greek literature and mythology – having studied such notions at undergraduate academic level – I personally found the examination of the psychological toll of war through Odysseus’s character in the film to be immensely fascinating. Odysseus returns to Ithaca as a fatigued, aged and defeated war hero, both physically and emotionally.
The audience is never told what specifics he endured on his ten years voyage home, but it is brutally apparent that what he endured in Troy was none of the glory or heroism he or his (all entirely slaughtered) men had been promised. Odysseus left Ithaca with his army as a King and military leader, but returns alone, a broken, vitriolic man.
In the Q&A at GFF, Pasolini explained how he studied and drew inspiration from clips of real-life US Vietnam veterans talking about their experiences and psychological injury. Several lines in the film were directly taken from the mouths of these veterans and their wives, including, for example, some of the final words Penelope says to Odysseus as the film concludes. Ralph Fiennes’ Odysseus embodies the physical and psychological scars that war can imprint on an individual who has witnessed the mass slaughters of his comrades on the battlefield. His return to Ithaca and his interactions with its people signifies an attempt to dismantle the glorification of war and expose its horrifying realities.
Released in the UK on the 11th April, The Return is a far cry from your typical action epic. With its lower-budget aesthetic and minimalistic narrative choices, the film doesn’t flaunt any sort of heroism and with Christopher Nolan’s own highly anticipated adaptation of the Odyssey (titled The Odyssey) set for release in July 2026, it’ll be interesting to see how these two films fare against one another as recent adaptations of Homer’s famous text.
