Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Return’ on Paramount+, an authentic interpretation of Homer's 'Odyssey' starring an absurdly ripped Ralph Fiennes (2025)

I fear history will render The Return (now streaming on Paramount+) a mere asterisk in the annals of film. On its own merits, it’s a compelling and authentic retelling of the latter books of Homer’s Odyssey, starring Ralph Fiennes as a weary but enduring Odysseus, returning to Ithaca after 20 years to stave off the suitors scratching at the door of his long-suffering wife Penelope, played by Juliette Binoche (co-starring with Fiennes for the first time since The English Patient put us all down for a nap). Alas, director Uberto Pasolini’s admirable efforts have already been eclipsed by Christopher Nolan’s sure-to-be-far-beyond-epic adaptation of the Odyssey, which isn’t due until sometime in 2026, but whose announcement occurred right about when The Return debuted in theaters. Pasolini’s film followed right on the heels of one of Fiennes’ best screen performances in Conclave, which also diverted our attention from this fine film. It deserves a better fate – and here’s why.

THE RETURN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: First things first: Fiennes didn’t skip a workout in preparation for this role, which is shirtless as hell. We noticed it with a mere glimpse at the trailer for The Return. You know that Fight Club quote about how, after six months of bare-knuckling in basements, guys are “carved out of wood”? That’s what Fiennes looks like here. Iggy Pop meets a sack of beef jerky. Terrifying. He’s 62 and YOU DON’T WANT TO F WITH HIM. He plays Odysseus at the tail end of his wild journeys to Troy and the island of the Sirens, his battles against cannibals and cyclopseses. He awakens naked and bleary on the shores of home island of Ithaca, crawling face down and dragging his poor weathered wang along a path before his former swineherd slave Eumaes (Claudio Santamaria) finds him. Nobody recognizes Odysseus. He’s seen things and is now a different man. Some of his scars are the same, as we’ll soon learn, but there’s lots of new ones too. Eumaes houses the man he doesn’t yet realize is his former king and master, nursing him back to health.

Elsewhere: palace intrigue, although we’re using the word “palace” loosely because 8th-century BC palaces are early brutalist constructions that make the serial-killer toolshed out back look like a French creperie. In the first of many intense and symbolically wrought looming sequences, Odysseus’ wife Penelope (Binoche) weaves a shroud for her dying father-in-law. Her mood is somewhere in the anguished murk of heartbroken pining for her husband and two decades of simmering pissed-offedness. Her home is overrun with her wannabe suitors, who are either pissbabies dripping with fetid entitlement or thickskulled cretins. She says she’ll at last choose a suitor when she’s done with the shroud, but every night, she tears threads out of it so she’ll never finish. Her and Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) doesn’t remember his father, and he holds his mother in contempt for her alleged infidelities, and her role in letting the country fall apart in the king’s absence. The power vacuum has created a tipping point in Ithaca, Penelope and Telemachus increasingly ripe for assassination.

And so we realize that Odysseus’ subterfuge is much to his benefit in this situation. Note, there are no gods or goddesses in this adaptation of the story, meddling in human matters and being arbiters of morality and suchlike. The closest we get to the supernatural is a moment with Odysseus’ dog, who’s been waiting obediently for his return – yes, like Fry’s pup in the most devastating episode of Futurama, exactly – and takes one sniff of his master and then dies. Posing as a lowly beggar, Odysseus analyzes the scenario, revealing his identity to people one by one, only when he learns he can trust them. He meets with Telemachus, who was tiny when he left, and he meets with Penelope, who might recognize him and might not, but her intuition is nothing to be sneezed at. It’s only a matter of time, people.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Fiennes was put on this earth to interpret classical fiction, so take his directing-himself effort Coriolanus and cross it with the period authenticity of The Northman (not quite to Robert Eggers’ level of obsessive detail, mind you) and the castle-family conflicts of The Lion in Winter, and you’re in The Return’s ballpark.

Performance Worth Watching: Copy-paste: Again, Fiennes was put on this earth to interpret classical fiction. Also to play nasty gangsters, secretly sad men in Wes Anderson films, dudes sad about dead Popes and Voldemort. The gun-to-my-head best working actor in the game today.

Memorable Dialogue: Odysseus reveals so much with but a few words: “For some, war becomes home.”

Sex and Skin: Full frontal Fiennes, Penelope’s female servants straddling suitors.

Our Take: The Return brings a familiar story to vibrant life thanks to Pasolini’s adherence to period accuracy and ability to render classical myth in a gritty, realistic manner. And you won’t be shocked to learn that Fiennes and Binoche’s dogged commitment to character and performance furthers their status among the best actors of their generation; the scenes they share bristle with unspoken inference, their pauses and expressions and intonations the toys in their playground as they embody characters that know some things and might not know other things, but sense things, and aren’t sure exactly what things the other knows, and leave us trying to interpret glances as knowing or simply seeking or searching. They’re hands-down great at delivering performances as entertaining as they are substantive.

And this is where I assert that, like Black Bag, we might need to set aside the intrigue and consider The Return a thorny examination of marriage and commitment. Homer likely devised the situation between Odysseus and Penelope as a grand romantic gesture, but Pasolini – co-writing with John Collee and Edward Bond – interprets it as an examination of decades-long love and commitment in all its thorny entanglements. Granted, 20 years is beyond the pale to modern sensibilities, but the suitors’ Pre-Christian Mingle profiles are far from enticing, which makes Odysseus’ penchant for brutality forgivable, for he is, at heart, a man of honor. Also, he’s shredded.

I joke of course, but there’s true insight in Fiennes and Binoche’s work, more than enough to endow The Return with depth and color, and ground the fantastical components of its source material. The film also addresses the burning why of their characters – why Odysseus would bother to return, why Penelope would bother to wait for him – with a simple, but powerful exchange between the two stars in the final moments. Simmering in the subtext are ideas about what war in all its nastiness means to men and women, and how it endows them with power, and Pasolini stages the inevitable bloodshed as a statement of anti-violence, similar to what Clint Eastwood did with Unforgiven. The Return offers a new angle on an old, old, old story, rendering it fresh, vital and thoroughly engrossing.

Our Call: Feel free to throw away the receipt – The Return is a keeper. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.