The Return (2024)

Uberto Pasolini spent thirty years circling Homer, and the result treats the Odyssey's homecoming as a quiet psychological chamber piece. Ralph Fiennes washes ashore naked, haggard, and largely silent, and the camera regards him with the patience of a hospice nurse. The supporting ensemble is European to its bones, with a handful of Greek and Mediterranean performers folded in because the story happens to be set in Ithaca. Nobody makes a fuss about it. There are no queer characters, no climate anxiety, no indictment of the wealthy, which here is not a moral failing but the plain consequence of adapting a Bronze Age poem about kingship and slaughter.

Juliette Binoche's Penelope gets real screen time and a measure of resolve, fending off suitors and choosing peace over vengeance at the climax. This tracks Homer closely enough that we cannot credit the film with importing a contemporary framework. The enslaved household, Eumaeus and Yias, is rendered as period furniture. Fiennes trained for months to look like old rope, a commitment to realism and not a statement about body image. His Odysseus is traumatized and hollowed out, though the film frames this as the ordinary wreckage of war, not as any kind of neurodivergence.

Stripping the gods from the poem is an aesthetic decision, not a revisionist reading of history. The tone is sombre and meditative throughout, and the film never turns to address the audience with a lesson. Here is prestige craftsmanship with almost no interest in the cultural arguments of its own moment. It is handsome, restrained, and content to let the ancients stay ancient.