Sarah Michelle Gellar’s career has been a bit like Linda Blair’s or Jamie Lee Curtis’s, earmarked by one or two horror-flick highlights and the rest (with obvious exceptions) seeming attempts to rekindle that old magic. Such is the case here where she plays Joanna Mills, a St. Louis businesswoman who “returns” home to smallville Texas to land a big deal. For reasons ill explained she’s hasn’t been back in 15 years, but when she crosses the border, an eerie Pasty Cline song and a denim-clad drifter crop up everywhere, and then there are the freaky flashbacks to the ’70s. The Return is a ghost story, the intersection of Joanna’s childhood with the tragic events that befell a taciturn loner (Peter O’Brien). Director Asif Kapadia does manage some intrigue, and Gellar, ever fashionable in tight jeans and trendy tops, puts in a yeoman turn, but the shoddy continuity and nonsensical supernatural mumbo-jumbo kill any returns.

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The Return's Web site://www.thereturnmovie.net/

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