Return to Sender (2015)
Certified: 15
Duration: 95 minutes
Directed by: Faoud Mikati
Starring: Rosamund Pike, Shiloh Fernandez, Nick Nolte, Camryn Manheim, Illeana Douglas
KRS Releasing Ltd
Rosamund Pike, whose icy and chameleon-like performance captivated cinemagoers in Gone Girl, here returns to familiar territory. Pike capitalises on her new screen image and elevates the film from being just another routine thriller. She brings to it an emotional core and also a dark and calculating tone. It is thanks to her performance that the film avoids descending into an overdone and overcooked melodrama.
Miranda (Rosamund Pike) is a nurse in a small, quiet town, who wants to become a surgical nurse. She is cheerful and focused on her work. One day, she is set up on a blind date whereby someone she does not know is to come and knock on her door. When William (Shiloh Fernandez) shows up, she thinks he is her date and she lets him in. Instead he rapes her and when the real date shows up, he calls the police. They soon find William and arrest him.
However, Miranda’s life changes. She loses control of the balance she had in her life. She can no longer sell her house since no one wants a house in which a rape occurred and she is also getting tremors which may endanger her career aspirations. Thus she starts writing letters to William who is in jail, letters which at first are returned to sender. At one point, she starts visiting William in prison and gets friendly. Her father Mitchell (Nick Nolte) is very upset about his daughter and tries to help her but she does not let him as she starts reorganising her life, her house and her plan.
Pike’s stone-cold demeanour is given the space to carry out revenge in a cold-hearted manner
Fernandez in his role of William is overshadowed by Pike’s presence. But Nolte’s performance also brings quality to the melodramatic script by Patricia Beauchamp and Joe Gossett. The two actors’ father-daughter relationship looks authentic and tangible.
Faoud Mikati, who had directed 2010’s action comedy Operation Endgame, delivers a film that is a throwback to the revenge movies that were so popular in the 1980s. His direction is staple and standard, leaving everything in the hands of his star attraction.
In this simple approach Pike’s stone cold demeanour is given the space to carry out revenge in a cold-hearted manner. Mikati seems to have felt the need not to have a major climax even though, when Pike decides to go medieval on Fernandez, there seems to be no holding back.
Film fans who enjoyed the likes of Jennifer Lopez’s The Boy Next Door will find that this mix of 1980s exploitation style of film-making mixed with melodrama will be to their liking. Pike’s performance seems to come into her own after the rape sequence. Even when given lines that are totally camp, she manages to deliver them with conviction and style. Go girl!