Return To Sender (4/10)

First of all, horrible, just a horrible title for this movie. The trailer too, if you've seen it, is not very good.

Then again, this movie isn't easy to market. Anything given away in the plot could be considered spoiling the main plot. So before I go into spoiler territory, I'll just mention a few things in general that I didn't like.

Like the choices the director Fouad Mikati made for certain scenes, especially when the two leads, Rosamund Pike and Shiloh Fernandez, met for the first time. It's difficult to determine what Mikati wanted to convey in that scene. Was it romance or awkwardness?

A lot of times I thought that was what failed the movie. Mikati didn't direct his actors well enough to make this movie progress smoothly. The expressions of the actors didn't quite gel with what the audience would expect given what was shown to us.

Only a bloated Nick Nolte seemed to have given the most convincing performance. Which is a shame as Pike has just come off of being nominated as a best actress in the Oscars and I thought she just wasn't given enough direction to act in this follow-up movie to her nomination.

The weakest link belonged to Fernandez, though probably Mikati was the main culprit for that. But also, the script was poorly done throughout. The lines written for the movie wasn't the most easy to act out.

The only satisfying point was towards the end when we understood who Pike's character was and what the movie was about. But just throughout the first three-quarters of the movie I was worried that it might go another way which would be just weird.

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Let's touch on some SPOILERS for a bit.

The romance insinuated by the director during the visitation scenes to the prison, the background music playing at the back was very distracting. For a long moment I actually thought that this woman was actually falling in love with her rapist. And I actually thought that this was turning into some kind of a sick and twisted romantic movie.

Even that painting of the rocking chair scene got me very uncomfortable, reminded me of the beginnings of the iconic pottery scene in Ghost.

Could the director have done it differently so as not to give that awkward feeling in the audience? I'd like to believe so. Let's just refer back to Gone Girl in which Pike played kind of a similar character. And the story had a great twist. And that was done beautifully.

And just another spoiler warning for Gone Girl if you haven't seen that, Return To Sender is like a prelude to Gone Girl. Here we get to see why Pike's character got so messed up in Gone Girl.

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Overall, it was a slow movie with bad acting from bad directing and just wasn't worth the story nor the character study.