The Return -- 2006 -- PG-13

Now here's a mixed bag of a film. It feels like a drama masquerading as a thriller with a handful of shock moments. But as a drama it doesn't work either for a handful of other reasons...

The plot is rather simple. A girl is having dreams and visions about a place she's never been to and an event she has never experienced. We come to realize this event is the murder of the person through whom she is experiencing all of this stuff. So this girl is in sales and she lands the opportunity to get a big account from down in Texas, a place she has avoided for years for reasons unknown. She apparently has a friend who works with the bigwig of this company that her company wants an account with (I think it's a shipping company of some kind). While there, the visions get more and more powerful and she sees more of what had gone on before. The curiosity gets the better of her and she finds a clue in one city and moves to check it out to get to the bottom of the matter.

The story itself is interesting enough. The plot unfolds kind of naturally and gives us only little bites to nibble on but not enough to give it all away as we move through it. Moments that make it a horror/thriller are few and far between making it almost a drama, but without sufficient character development, it would hardly qualify. In fact, only the lead character gets much in the way of development. The guy she develops an interest in and was in her visions gets a little bit, but everyone else is just cardboard. The story does tie itself up fairly neatly at the end, though, and gives us a decent ending.

We do have our fair share of weird hiccups. The jacket from Netflix says there is a stalking boyfriend, but in the movie, this guy is a forceful co-worker who was upset she got the big account he always gets. He shows up down in Texas at one point and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why he's there. His presence is fairly gratuitous, actually, and we could have done without him. A deleted scene reveals that he originally was the stalking boyfriend, and it was kind of creepy, but it was still gratuitous and unnecessary.

There was an obsession with a certain Toyota truck in one series of scenes. We saw the tailgate in one shot, and when the girl was walking through a parking lot, we see it two more times when she passes it...twice.

There was one jump point that was actually kind of amusing when I thought about it. When the girl looks down while sitting in front of a mirror, we see the face of the other person in the mirror overlapping hers. It's pretty weird. When she looks up, she jumps and the soundtrack hits, causing the audience to jump as well. Why wouldn't we jump when we see the face? Kind of odd.

So it makes for an ok little thriller. The story has some problems, and there are some points that don't make some sense, but on the whole it's ok. The deleted scenes and alternate ending on the DVD serve to further illustrate how all over the place they were on this storyline. It could have been a lot better if there had some measure of character development and fewer contrivances, but hey, that's the way with a lot of stories.