The Return – Ralph Fiennes embarks upon on a nail-biting odyssey

After his Oscar-nominated turn in top-of-the-popes thriller Conclave – and all the attendant awards season hoopla – we’ve seen rather a lot of Ralph Fiennes recently. But you’ll see a whole lot more of him in The Return: his hero of yore Odysseus is introduced, zonked out and butt naked, after washing up on the shore of his homeland.

Being unconscious on a Greek island beach in your birthday suit is usually a sign of hedonistic excess. But for this rather careworn Odysseus it is the culmination of two decades of exhausting graft. Every school kid hopefully still knows it took Homer’s warrior-king 10 years to fight the Trojan War, and then another decade to find his way back to his family on Ithaca via a gauntlet of sirens, witches and man eating cyclopses. 

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The Return is the latest in an epically long line of Homeric adaptations, then, but one that narrows its focus to the very last phase of the original odyssey. There are swords and sandals but no gods or monsters. It is a deliberately grounded take on the story, to the extent that when the dazed Odysseus belatedly realises his journey is complete he literally crams soil into his mouth. He has been craving home for years.

A lot has changed in two decades, though. Ithaca is a stricken place in deep recession. The sun-bleached fort where Odysseus left his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) and young son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) is besieged by something almost worse than an army: a swarm of uncouth suitors keen to claim Penelope’s hand and lands, as her husband is presumed long dead. When they are not mocking Telemachus these peacocking bullies stalk the surrounding farms to sate their degenerate appetites.

Surely Odysseus will race home and kick their asses? It seems a likely prospect, particularly as Fiennes is in terrifyingly wiry shape, all corded arm muscles and wicked battle scars across his weathered torso. But Odysseus remains lost. Through modern eyes it might be diagnosed as PTSD or survivor’s guilt. In Homeric terms, he is questioning whether he is still worthy of being a king, husband or father after neglecting those duties for two decades.

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One upside is that no-one connects this wild-eyed castaway with their absent ruler, so he can roam Ithaca freely as a destitute ex-soldier and hear how the people celebrate or curse the name of Odysseus. In a nod to Homer’s oral tradition we hear the story of the sacking of Troy as a campfire tale. He can even talk to his wife and son incognito to gauge how they might feel about him re-entering their lives. 

Penelope isn’t daft – she has been keeping her suitors at bay with a mix of regality and loom-related subterfuge – so she clearly twigs that she is talking to her husband even if the ragged man before her could do with a long soak. But in a wonderfully theatrical scene, the reunited stars of The English Patient maintain the pretence that they are strangers talking in hypotheticals rather than estranged lovers trying to reconnect.

It all builds to a climactic test of strength and skill, where Penelope agrees to marry the man who is able to restring her husband’s hunting bow and shoot an arrow through a dozen axe heads embedded in a line so their socket holes create the narrowest of tunnels. Earlier this year another historical epic, William Tell, ratcheted up the tension ahead of a pivotal display of archery; The Return is similarly methodical and nail-biting.

Veteran producer turned director Uberto Pasolini – who helped shepherd The Full Monty into a mega-hit – has apparently been grappling with adapting Homer for three decades. Christopher Nolan’s next blockbuster is based on The Odyssey so it feels like Pasolini’s close character study has snuck in under the wire. What it may lack in Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion skeleton warriors, it gains from a totally committed lead performance by Fiennes, whose anguish feels palpable.

The Return is an unashamedly grown-up film, stately in pace and maudlin in mood. But once Hollywood producers see how ripped and intimidating Fiennes looks when he ditches the vestments, they will be swarming like hungry swains around Penelope to sign him up for a Taken-style old geezer action flick. Move over Homer: the era of wreck-it Ralph may have begun.

The Return is in cinemas from 11 April.

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