Everything I Liked and Hated about Uberto Pasolini’s ‘The Return’ (2024)

The Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic poem, is one of the most famous works of world literature. Countless adaptations of it have come out over the years in virtually all forms of media including books, stage plays, films, television series, video games, and musicals—but one thing most of these adaptations have in common is that they focus on one relatively small section of the epic. Although the whole epic consists of twenty-four “books” (which are roughly the length of chapters), most adaptations focus mostly or entirely on Books 9–12, a first-person account by Odysseus of his various adventures while trying to return to his home island of Ithaka. The stories found in these four books have become so iconic that, when one mentions the Odyssey, they are what most people immediately think of: the man-eating Kyklops, the Lotos-eaters, the sorceress Kirke who turns men into pigs, the summoning of the dead, Skylla and Kharybdis, and the Sirens who lure sailors to their deaths.

Many people who haven’t read the original epic don’t realize that Odysseus arrives back on Ithaka in Book 13 and the entire second half of the epic (Books 13–24) describes what happens after he gets back. It’s easy to see why the second half of the epic receives less attention than the first half; the pace is slower, the events described are less fantastic and more mundane, and modern audiences who have been conditioned to see the epic as being about Odysseus’s journey home may assume that the story is over once he arrives on Ithaka’s shore. The second half of the epic, however, is a tour de force of storytelling containing some of the greatest drama and pathos in the whole epic.

This is why I was initially very excited about the film The Return, directed by Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, which was released on December 6th, 2024. The film is an adaptation of the last twelve books of the Odyssey that begins with Odysseus’s arrival home, omitting his better-known earlier adventures. I promised that I would write a review of the film and now I am coming through on that promise (albeit three months late). Unfortunately, having now seen the film, I have mixed feelings about it. It contains some strong acting and truly great moments (including a twist on the bow scene worthy of the original Odyssey), but the film’s dialogue is weak, it fundamentally mischaracterizes Odysseus in a way that erases his complexity and makes him less interesting, its characterization of Penelope is wildly inconsistent, and certain changes to the plot result in convoluted storytelling.

First: the visuals

I will begin by talking about what I liked. Despite the fact that, compared to most mainstream epic films, The Return was shot on a shoestring budget, it has strong visuals and is chock-full of gorgeous cinematography, including many beautiful shots of the natural landscape.

I am not highly concerned about “historical accuracy” in a film that is based on the Homeric epics because the original epics themselves are not “historically accurate” to any given era. The Iliad and the Odyssey most likely reached forms resembling those in which we know them today around the seventh century BCE, but they are notionally set centuries earlier. The poems themselves do not clearly define exactly when they take place, so all we can really say is that it is at some hazy point in the distant, mythic past. They portray a world that indiscriminately blends elements of different historical periods as well as pure fantasy elements.

The cities that are prominent in the Homeric epics generally correspond to those that were most prominent during the Bronze Age, but not necessarily later periods. In the Iliad 10.260–265, the warrior Meriones gives Odysseus a distinctive leather helmet adorned with rows of boar’s tusks; this kind of helmet was worn during the Bronze Age, but fell out of use after the tenth century BCE.

Despite this, the poems depict a decentralized political order in which heroes are primarily loyal to local clan leaders, which corresponds to the political situation of the Early Iron Age, and doesn’t correspond well to the Bronze Age, when highly organized and centralized kingdoms dominated. Meanwhile, apart from rare exceptions like the boar’s tusk helmet, the combat styles, formations, and military equipment the poems describe generally correspond to the first half of the seventh century BCE (Van Wees 1994).

The epics also contain pure fantasy elements, such as: armor pieces that are unrealistically made of silver or gold, heroes who are superhumanly strong and fast, unrealistic widespread adherence to idealistic rules of behavior that were probably never followed in real life in any period to the extent they are in the poems, Akhilleus’s talking horses in the Iliad, overt divine intervention throughout both poems, the monumental Akhaian wall that is somehow built from scratch in a single day in Iliad 12, the Kyklopes and all the other fantastic monsters in the Odyssey, etc. It is obvious that the original Iliad and Odyssey follow the “rule of cool” more than anything else.

The world of the Iliad and the Odyssey corresponds to the historical Bronze Age about as well as a modern Dungeons and Dragons campaign corresponds to the historical Middle Ages. Sure, they have some things that actually existed in the Bronze Age, but there’s also stuff from later periods mixed in, as well as magic, superheroes, and fantasy creatures. Modern storytellers may choose to set their adaptations of the Homeric epics in the Mycenaean Period and try to reflect the culture of that period accurately, but this is itself a departure from the original epics. There is no way one can be simultaneously true to both the epics themselves and the historical Mycenaean Period.

That being said, it makes sense for modern audiences to expect a film that is ostensibly set in ancient Greece to feature costumes, hairstyles, sets, props, and so forth that look authentically ancient Greek. We may call this “cultural authenticity” rather than “historical accuracy.” To some, these may seem like the same thing, but they are subtly different. For our purposes, we’ll say that “historically accurate” means matching the known styles of the specific time period and location in which the story takes place (e.g., Ithaka in the twelfth century BCE), whereas “culturally authentic” simply means resembling something that existed in some part of Greece in some period of antiquity.

Overall, by this broad definition, the costumes are fairly close to authentic. They generally resemble the clothing styles of the Archaic and Classical Periods more closely than those of the Bronze Age. That being said, they are not always perfect.

For some reason, many of the male characters are shown wearing their cloaks (or, to use the Greek term, himatia) around their necks like scarves, which is not authentic and looks very strange. Historically, for men, the himation was always meant to be worn wrapped around the body and draped over the left shoulder. (In Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds, there is a joke where Poseidon has to demonstrate the right way to wear a himation to a barbarian god who has ignorantly draped his over the wrong shoulder.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure amphora dated c. 490 BCE depicting a man wearing a himation

The himatia that the characters in the film wear often also appear to have less width of fabric than those that were worn historically. The historical himation was a large, rectangular piece of fabric of similar size to a large blanket, but the ones worn in The Return are often long and thin, bearing a closer resemblance to thick scarves, although this may be partly an effect of the actors’ wearing them wrong.

ABOVE: Shot from The Return showing two of the suitors wearing their cloaks like scarves. One of them also has an undercut with slicked-back bangs.

I was pleased to see characters in the film wearing a wide variety of different colors of clothing, which is more historically authentic and more visually interesting than the norm for Hollywood films set in ancient Greece, which is to portray almost everyone wearing stark white.

Historically, in ancient Greece, enslaved people and less wealthy individuals would have most commonly worn clothes of undyed wool, which (depending on the color of the sheep) can be off-white, beige, brown, gray, or black. Meanwhile, more affluent Greeks wore clothes that were dyed a wide range of bright colors, including red (with madder or kermes), orange-yellow (with saffron), blue (with woad), and green (with various plants). The very wealthy sometimes wore purple (which was dyed with murex). Well-off people’s clothes were usually woven or embroidered with elaborate patterns and designs, as vase paintings depict.

Some ancient Greeks did wear all-white, including priests and priestesses and followers of the Orphic and Pythagorean mystery traditions, but they were not the majority of people and they intentionally wore all-white to set themselves apart.

One minor quibble about the color of the costumes is that The Return depicts both the enslaved swineherd Eumaios and Odysseus in his disguise as a beggar as wearing purple, which isn’t authentic, since murex purple was the most expensive kind of dye, so only very wealthy, high-status people could afford to wear it, not beggars and swineherds.

The hairstyles in the film are generally fairly authentic-looking, but there are a few misses. Penelope wears her hair down and loose more often than an ancient Greek woman probably would; Greek women usually wore their hair either braided or tied in a loose bun at the back of the head (exact styles varied depending on the time period), unless they were in mourning or had just gotten out of either bed or the bath. One of the suitors also has an undercut with slicked-back bangs, which is not a style that existed in ancient Greece in any period.

The indoor sets are generally simple, but, for the most part, they look plausible for an ancient Greek setting. I did wince at the shots of Penelope weaving on an early-modern-style handloom, rather than a much simpler vertical warp-weighted loom of the kind that was actually used in the ancient Mediterranean, but that’s a minor detail that I suspect few other people noticed.

ABOVE: Shot of Penelope tearing apart her work at her loom from the film. The loom depicted here is of a more modern type than existed in the classical Mediterranean.

Overall, the visual aspects of this film are pretty solid. The few inauthentic details I spotted are very minor compared to those that appear in most historical films set in the ancient world. (I could spend literally all day listing much more blatant anachronisms in the Gladiator films, for instance.)

The Return‘s depiction of some of my favorite scenes

Another thing I liked about The Return is that it depicts some of my favorite scenes from the original Odyssey that rarely make it into adaptations. One notable example occurs in Book 17.290–327, when Odysseus, who is disguised as a beggar, and his enslaved swineherd Eumaios (to whom he has not yet revealed his identity) are approaching Odysseus’s manor and they see his aged hunting dog Argos, whom no one has cared for in his absence and who has survived for over twenty years awaiting his beloved master’s return, lying in filth and infested with parasites.

Upon recognizing his master, Argos drops his ears and wags his tail, but he is too old and weak to run to him. Odysseus, who recognizes the dog, sheds a tear and asks Eumaios about him. Having heard his master’s voice one last time, Argos dies. The Return incorporates this incident more-or-less faithfully.

ABOVE: Illustration for Chatterbox from 1886 depicting the scene from Odyssey Book 17 in which Odysseus and Argos recognize each other

Later, in the Odyssey Book 18, Odysseus is still disguised as a beggar, now at his own manor, where the suitors of his wife Penelope who have taken over the household in his long absence mock and abuse him. At this point, a mean beggar named Iros shows up and insults Odysseus. The two men argue and the suitors’ ringleader Antinoös proposes that they should fight each other for the suitors’ entertainment, offering a prize of food to whoever wins.

The suitors think that Odysseus looks puny and that Iros, who looks bigger and stronger, will easily beat him and perhaps kill him, but Odysseus proves a more capable fighter than they expected and quickly defeats Iros. Although he knows that he could kill Iros, he chooses to spare him because he thinks that killing him would attract too much attention to himself, so, instead, he sends him away with a warning.

In the original epic, this incident serves primarily as a comic interlude that has relatively minimal impact on the plot, but it vividly illustrates the character of both the suitors and Odysseus. It shows that the suitors are truly some of the most awful people on the planet—the kind of people who think that making beggars fight for scraps is good entertainment—and it shows that Odysseus is tougher than he looks.

This scene almost never makes it into any Odyssey adaptation, but it does make it into The Return, albeit in a slightly altered form. In the film, when Odysseus first arrives at the manor, another beggar challenges him. Odysseus tries to avoid a fight, but the man attacks him and the suitors cheer him on. The other man knocks Odysseus to the ground and seems to win, but Odysseus, while still on the ground, knocks him over, causing him to crack open his skull on the stone. It’s a brief scene that greatly condenses the beggar fight incident, but manages to preserve its spirit, showing both the suitors’ cruelty to those more vulnerable than themselves and Odysseus’s resourcefulness.

The bow scene

The part of The Return that I liked the most, however, is how it adapts the climactic scene of the test of the bow. In the original Odyssey, in Book 21, Penelope retrieves Odysseus’s old unstrung bow from a storeroom and tells the suitors that she will marry the man who is able to string the bow and use it to shoot an arrow “through” twelve axe heads, a feat which she says only Odysseus could do.

There is scholarly debate regarding what precisely the nature of this challenge is. It could mean that the winner of the challenge must shoot an arrow through rings on the axes meant for hanging them on the wall, through gaps between the handles and the heads themselves, or though the actual metal of the axe heads themselves (which would make the contest one of superhuman strength just as much as one of accuracy). The classicist Peter Gainsford has written a very accessible blog post discussing the nature of this scene and its ambiguity, which I highly recommend.

In the original epic, Penelope’s motive for proposing this challenge is also ambiguous. Some scholars argue that, by this point, she has already recognized the beggar as her husband and that she is proposing the challenge in order to help him. Others argue that she hasn’t recognized Odysseus and is merely proposing the test as another tactic to delay having to choose one of the suitors to marry.

Whatever the case may be, all of the suitors try to string the bow, but none of them are able to. Then, on Telemakhos’s orders, Eumaios delivers the bow to Odysseus, who is still disguised as a beggar. The suitors mock him as he takes and examines the bow, but then he strings it and fires an arrow straight through the axe heads, leaving all the suitors stunned. At last, he throws off his disguise and begins to shoot the suitors.

The Return depicts this scene brilliantly, capturing much of the tension and drama it holds in the original epic. On top of this, it adds a very appropriately Odyssean twist to the scene. The original epic never explains why Odysseus is able to string and draw the bow when none of the suitors are able. Scholars and readers simply assume either that the bow is magic and can only be strung by its rightful owner or that Odysseus is just superhumanly physically strong and can perform feats that other men can’t.

In The Return, however, when Odysseus takes the bow, he carefully heats it over the fire to make the wood more pliant, hooks one end on his foot, and bends it across his torso using the strength of both his leg and his arms, allowing him to hook the string. In other words, in this version, there is a special technique to stringing the bow that only Odysseus knows.

I felt that this was a perfect addition to the story: a detail that wasn’t in the original epic, but frankly should have been, since it so perfectly suits Odysseus’s character. This is one of the very few moments in the film that I feel accurately captured the spirit of Odysseus in the original poem.

ABOVE: Ulysses and Telemachus Kill Penelope’s Suitors, painted in 1812 by the French Neoclassical painter Thomas Degeorge

How The Return fails at exploring Odysseus’s character

This brings me to what I consider by far The Return‘s greatest failure, which is that, apart from rare moments like this where the Odyssey‘s Odysseus manages to show through, most of the film fundamentally mischaracterizes Odysseus in a way that makes him a far less interesting character than he is in the original. The Return portrays Odysseus as a grizzled war veteran who is haunted by trauma and guilt from all the violence that he has seen and inflicted. This in itself is a really interesting idea and it brings out an aspect of Odysseus as a character that is present, but downplayed, in the original epic.

Unfortunately, the way that the film tries to show that Odysseus is traumatized and ashamed of his past is by having him barely speak. Even when he does speak in the film, he mostly does so in short, simple phrases and sentences and he says almost nothing about his past, either about his time at Troy or his wanderings afterward. This is exactly the opposite of who Odysseus is in the original epic.

In the original Odyssey, Odysseus is renowned for his extraordinary eloquence and he is constantly telling stories about his past to everyone he meets. The catch is that most of the stories he tells are lies. Most famously, in the Odyssey Books 9–12, Odysseus describes to the Phaiakians on the island of Skheria the story of his wanderings and various misadventures since leaving Troy in elaborate detail.

Nearly all the famous episodes that the Odyssey is known for occur within this narration, including the encounter with Polyphemos, the Island of the Winds, the Lotos-eaters and Laistrygonians, the sorceress Kirke who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, the journey to the edge of the earth and summoning of the spirits of the dead, Skylla and Kharybdis, the Seirenes, and the cattle of the sun.

Although readers often take Odysseus’s story to the Phaiakians as narratively true, many scholars have argued that Odysseus is an unreliable narrator for this portion of the epic, pointing out that he is known for telling lies, that the story he tells is highly fantastic, and that many parts of his story are never alluded to or confirmed outside of his account. It is natural for us to consider that Odysseus may be exaggerating, inventing, or distorting events to entertain his audience and make them feel greater sympathy for him.

Later in the epic, after he arrives on Ithaka, Odysseus tells three different long, highly elaborate lies about his identity and past to different people: first to Athena shortly after arriving on Ithaka (Od. 13.256–286), then to Eumaios in his hut (Od. 14.191–359), and finally to Penelope during their only one-on-one conversation before the test of the bow (Od. 19.166–307).

The Return would have been far, far more interesting if it had embraced this aspect of Odysseus’s character instead of eliminating it wholesale. Although it is true that being silent about one’s past is a common response among veterans and others who have experienced great trauma, it is not the only response to trauma.

A more thoughtful writer might have considered how Odysseus’s habit of concocting elaborate lies about his identity and his past might be a different, more unusual kind of trauma response. In effect, he could be running from his past not by refusing to talk about it, but rather by constantly inventing lies about it.

The Return (and every other modern Odyssey adaptation) could benefit tremendously from looking to Madeline Miller’s characterization of Odysseus in her novels The Song of Achilles and Circe, which I think really nail Odysseus’s character far better than any other modern adaptations I’ve seen. In her novels, as in the original epics, Odysseus is a complicated figure; he is charming and full of stories, but, at the same time, a cunning liar, a concealer of both information and his true feelings, a man who always has a thousand plans, who resorts to dirty tricks to get what he wants, and who is capable of appalling ruthlessness and brutality.

The Return, by contrast, depicts Odysseus as a surprisingly passive character who sometimes comes across as downright pitiful and helpless. This also stands in marked contrast to the original Odyssey, in which he is a very active character throughout his entire time on Ithaka. The whole point of him pretending to be a beggar is to learn more about what the situation on Ithaka is like, test to find out which people are truly loyal to him, and plan his revenge without the suitors knowing.

It is this sense of agency and driving purpose that carries Books 13–22 of the original epic. A lot of people complain that this section of the epic feels slow in comparison to the earlier books, but the whole time Odysseus is testing people, forging alliances that he will need, planning, and making arrangements for the climactic moment. The fact that the audience knows Odysseus is planning to kill the suitors and witnesses him carefully laying the pieces of his trap into place is what makes the payoff when he turns his bow on the suitors so satisfying.

The Return, by contrast, loses the sense of driving purpose that is so important in the original epic. Ralph Fiennes’s Odysseus seems aimless and indecisive up until the moment he enters the great hall while Penelope is proposing the contest of the bow—a scene which the film does an extremely poor job of setting up for.

In the original epic, Odysseus arranges for the suitors’ weapons to be taken away and hidden where they will not be able to access them, has all the doors blocked so the suitors won’t be able to escape, and orders Eurykleia to shut all the women inside the women’s quarters and bar the doors before the contest so that none of them will be present for the massacre.

The Return, by contrast, omits all of these arrangements and instead inserts a strange sequence in which Odysseus kills two of the suitors to protect Telemakhos, which results in him, Eumaios, and Telemakhos all having to flee into hiding in the woods to escape the other suitors, who are pursuing them in order to kill them.

I imagine that the writers/director added this part in order to have more action and heighten suspense for the audience. The problem is that it comes at a point right before the test of the bow, which has to happen in the great hall of the palace, which means that the fugitives have to go back to the palace, which is where all the suitors who want to kill them are.

Then, for some reason, the suitors just let them all come back and seem to forget the fact that they had just been chasing them to try to kill them. On top of this, the film never explains why the suitors don’t have any weapons to fight back or why they aren’t able to flee during the climactic scene because it omitted the part where Odysseus takes care of those things.

Inconsistent characterization of Penelope

The original Odyssey leaves Penelope’s true thoughts and feelings largely ambiguous. Scholars have argued back and forth for millennia over the questions of whether she recognizes or suspects that the beggar is really Odysseus before the test of the bow, at what point she may recognize or begin to suspect him, whether she plans the test of the bow deliberately in order to help him, how she really feels about his return, and to what extent if at all she feels sympathy for the suitors.

I understand and like the fact that The Return tries to depict Penelope as emotionally conflicted over Odysseus’s return and the suitors’ subsequent deaths. The problem is that, in order for a film like this to work, her actions need to have some underlying logic or consistency. In the actual film, nearly all of her character development happens off screen and there is so little consistency to her portrayed actions that she comes across less like she is emotionally conflicted and more like she has multiple personalities that come and go at random.

At the beginning of the film, as in the original poem, Penelope adamantly refuses to marry any of the suitors, insists that Odysseus will be her only husband, and uses tricks to postpone having to remarry. Nonetheless, she displays a clear preference for Antinoös over the other suitors. I thought that all this was fine.

Unfortunately, the scene in which Penelope meets Odysseus disguised as a beggar for the first time is, in my opinion, possibly the worst handled in the entire film. In the version of this scene that occurs in the original epic, it is unclear whether Penelope recognizes Odysseus and, if so, how she feels. Odysseus tells a long, elaborate lie that he is a Kretan who fought in the Trojan War and knew her husband. He describes to her the tunic Odysseus was wearing when he went to Troy, which causes her to break down because she recognizes it as one she wove for him herself. He tells her that he knows that Odysseus is alive. She, in turn, describes to him an ominous dream she had, which he interprets to mean that her husband will soon return.

The Return throws out this entire conversation and replaces it with a totally different exchange that makes no sense at all for the characters in context and feels extremely forced to the point of outright absurdity, in which Penelope angrily demands to know what war crimes her husband may have committed, particularly whether he raped women, and Odysseus struggles to answer.

Quite frankly, it is inconceivable that Penelope would bring up the topic of Odysseus’s possible war crimes in this context unless she is either extremely stupid and unsubtle or her intention is to torture her interlocutor, neither of which fits her character. In the film, Odysseus has told Penelope that he fought with her husband. Whether she recognizes him or not, she knows that he has been at war. She also knows that he has come to her house as a beggar and is at her mercy.

Even if Penelope is privately worried that her husband may have committed war crimes, she isn’t going to ask that question in this context. It should be obvious to her that, if her husband did commit war crimes, this man is never going to tell her that he did and asking him about it is only going to offend and upset him.

I understand that the writers of this scene were trying to show that Odysseus’s actions while at war have strained his relationship with Penelope, but having her demand answers from him directly in their very first meeting after twenty years is the wrong way to show that. It would have been far more effective to have had a scene sometime before Penelope’s meeting with the disguised Odysseus in which she privately confides to Telemakhos or one of her maids that she worries about what atrocities her husband might have done during the war and that it weighs heavily on her.

Then, with Penelope’s fears established in this earlier scene, they could have shown much subtler tension in her first meeting with Odysseus. Through a combination of strong writing and strong acting, they could have shown that Penelope is thinking about Odysseus’s wartime actions, but she is wise and tactful enough not to mention them. For example, they could have had her look troubled and afraid as she asks the beggar Odysseus in a general way to tell her what her husband did at Troy and the audience will infer that she is worried about possible war crimes he may have committed without her saying this. Unfortunately, the writers of The Return struggle with any kind of subtlety.

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the Macellum of Pompeii depicting the first meeting between Penelope and Odysseus disguised as a beggar in the Odyssey Book 19

Over the rest of the film Penelope’s characterization only seems to grow even more muddied and confused. At one point, she seems to be on the verge on announcing her intention to marry Antinoös. Then Odysseus walks in, which leads her to suddenly propose the test of the bow instead. Later, when Odysseus asks to have a turn with the bow and Telemakhos (who is holding it) hesitates to give it him, she orders him to give him the bow, calling him “your father,” indicating unambiguously that she has recognized him by this point.

The film never gives us any indication of what changes in Penelope’s mind at this moment and leads her to accept Odysseus back. Her sudden change of mind is even more confusing when one considers that she hasn’t spoken to or seen him since the earlier conversation in which she angrily demanded to know what war crimes he’d committed.

None of the possible explanations make much sense. It is hard to believe that Penelope didn’t recognize Odysseus when she spoke to him up-close and has only just now recognized him from across the room. If she has known that he is Odysseus since that first conversation and wanted him back, then it is hard to understand why she seemed like she was planning to accept Antinoös’s proposal right until the moment he came into the room. On the other hand, if she has known he is Odysseus this whole time and was still planning to choose Antinoös over him, it is hard to understand why simply seeing him would suddenly make her change her mind.

Finally, in the film, while Odysseus and Telemakhos are massacring the suitors, Penelope enters the hall, positively aghast. As Telemakhos is about to kill Antinoös, she desperately begs him to spare his life and seems absolutely devastated when he kills him. Then, just a few scenes later, she seems to have totally forgotten whatever reservations she had about Odysseus and is fully in love with him again as though the whole massacre never happened. The film gives no explanation why she undergoes this radical transformation of attitude. Has she really forgiven him that quickly and easily?

Penelope is supposed to be an intelligent, subtle character and I wish that the film had portrayed this better.

The short-changing of Laërtes

In the original Odyssey, in the famous nekyia scene of Book 11, Odysseus travels to the edge of the earth, where he sacrifices a ram and an ewe to summon up the spirits of the dead. He sees many ghosts of people he knew, including his mother Antikleia, who was still alive when he left Ithaka and has died during his years of absence. She does not initially recognize him until after he allows her to drink the blood of the sacrifice, which restores her memory. She then tells him that she died grieving for him and that his father Laërtes is still alive, but lives alone in a cottage in grief for his son’s absence. Odysseus tries to embrace her three times, but she floats away from him like a shadow.

The second half of the epic follows a series of reunions between Odysseus and members of his household: his enslaved swineherd Eumaios, his son Telemakhos, his dog Argos, his childhood nurse Eurykleia, his wife Penelope, and, finally, in Book 24 in one of the very last scenes of the epic, his aged and grieving father Laërtes. This final reunion is one of the most touching.

Frustratingly, The Return departs from the original epic on this storyline. The film portrays Laërtes as senile and makes him die early, after Odysseus has arrived on Ithaka, but before he has a chance to meet him. It does include a scene of Odysseus grieving over his father’s corpse, but it doesn’t deliver nearly the same payoff as the final, living reunion between father and son in the original epic.

Lack of engagement with ancient Greek beliefs around the concept of xenia

Another criticism I have of The Return is one that I have of many other modern Greek myth adaptations, including the 2004 film Troy, which is that it does not seriously engage with the deeply religious nature of ancient Greek society and values. I think it is fine that Pasolini decided not to depict the gods as directly interfering in the events of the story as they do in the original Odyssey, but I find it frustrating that he gives very little indication of any of the characters in the story believing in the gods and doesn’t show how the values of ancient Greek polytheism shape their actions.

One of the most absolutely sacred values in ancient Greek culture was that of xenia, which is the proper relationship between a host and guests. The ancient Greeks believed that every host had an essential duty to treat their guests with kindness and generosity according to prescriptive norms and that every guest had the same duty to their host. To violate xenia by mistreating one’s host or guest was considered a heinous crime not just against the person, but against the gods themselves, who were thought to protect and enforce the laws of xenia.

Xenia is one of the most important and central themes throughout the original Odyssey, especially Books 13–24. The reason why the suitors must die by Odysseus’s arrows is because they continually and unrepentantly violate xenia by mistreating Odysseus as their host and the owner of the manor in which they are staying and by mistreating Odysseus as their guest when he is disguised as a beggar. By engaging in this behavior, they are not just wronging Odysseus, but also mocking the gods and trampling the very fabric of civilization itself. When Odysseus massacres them all, he does so with the certain conviction that he is carrying out the will of the gods.

The Return doesn’t really engage with this aspect of the original story, which contributes to flattening the narrative and the characters’ motivations.

Bad dialogue/lack of dialogue

My final, general criticism of The Return is that it makes poor use of dialogue as a medium for storytelling. It has less dialogue overall than it needs to tell the story it is trying to tell and most of the dialogue it does have is terse, choppy, unnatural-sounding, and not very revealing of character. Ralph Fiennes is a strong actor, but the writers for this film really didn’t give him much to work with.

I realize that the writers of this film wanted to make it a lean, stripped-down version of the Odyssey and to avoid the mistake many historical films make of being too “talky,” but, in my opinion, they took things too far in the opposite direction. Realistic, compelling dialogue is an essential element of most storytelling and this film just does not have it.

The film’s laconicism also really does not fit the setting or the characters. Part of me suspects that the writers of this film may have gotten too sucked into thinking of mythic Greece as a primitive, violent society and may have forgotten that the other defining attribute of an ideal Homeric hero in addition to martial prowess is skill at speaking.

Homeric Greek was just as linguistically rich, complex, varied, and expressive as modern English. Storytelling in many diverse forms was absolutely central to ancient Greek society both in and outside the Homeric epics. As I have already mentioned, one of Odysseus’s defining character attributes in the original poems is his eloquence. Just because this film is set in an ancient society that was less technologically sophisticated than our own doesn’t mean that people couldn’t use words longer than two syllables or string together sentences longer than six words. (On the contrary, Ancient Greek is notoriously fond of long words and long, complex sentences.)

Conclusion

Overall, The Return is far from a bad film, but it fails to live up to the high potential of its premise. I would give it three out of five stars. It is better than most films set in the ancient world, but, quite frankly, movies like Alexander (2004), Troy (2004), 300 (2006), Immortals (2011), Clash of the Titans (2011), Wrath of the Titans (2012), 300: Rise of an Empire (2014), The Legend of Hercules (2014), Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), Gods of Egypt (2016), and Gladiator II (2024) have set the bar for twenty-first-century films set in the ancient world very low indeed.

In the meantime, Christopher Nolan has an adaptation of the Odyssey with an absolutely massive budget and a cast studded with huge names that is set to come out in 2026. It will be interesting to see how that film compares with The Return.

Works cited

• Van Wees, Hans. 1994. “The Homeric Way of War: The Iliad and the Hoplite Phalanx,” Parts I & II. Greece & Rome.