The Return 2006

Joanna Mills, a travelling representative for a trucking company, is dedicated to her successful career but something of a loner. Since the age of 11, she has carried a history of troubled moments, including bouts of self-mutilation and unsettling visions that feel more like memories from a life she cannot recall. On a trip meant to secure a crucial client back in her native Texas, she finds the pressure of the road accentuating these visions, the echoes of faces and scenes that aren’t hers surfacing with increasing intensity. A strange, staring face appears in the mirror, and her truck radio stubbornly fills the cabin with Patsy Cline’s Sweet Dreams no matter which station she chooses. She pauses at a roadside accident that, in the morning, seems to have vanished from existence altogether, followed by a bar restroom scene where she cuts herself and is narrowly saved by a friend.

Her father, Sam Shepard, reminds her that since she was 11, she has been a different girl, a line that rings with uneasy truth as the visions grow more precise and menacing. The images lock onto a man she does not recognize and a bar she has never stepped foot in, yet a photograph of that bar sits in one of her catalogs, pulling her toward a place she only glimpses in sleep. Drawn by the image to Texas, she arrives in a town she hasn’t visited since childhood and encounters a man named Terry Stahl. Terry’s wife Annie was stalked, brutally assaulted, and left to die fifteen years earlier, a crime that Terry was suspected of but never convicted for. As Joanna’s visions persist, she uncovers more connections between Annie’s life and her own, each revelation tightening the mystery.

The investigation drives her to the killer herself, and the visions guide her to recover the knife used in the original crime from its hidden place. She continues to be stalked in turn, pulled into a chilling repetition of the crime. Yet this time, she acts on what she has seen and uses the recovered knife to strike back, exacting vengeance on the man who harmed Annie. The film’s revelation reframes the entire mystery: Annie, clinging to life as Terry drives her toward the hospital after the original assault, dies when his car collides with one driven by Joanna’s father, in which the eleven-year-old Joanna was a passenger. Moments after the crash, Annie’s fate appears to converge with Joanna’s own fate, and Joanna awakens with the haunting sense that Annie’s soul has reincarnated within her body, thus becoming “a different girl.” The movie closes on a quiet, unresolved note as Joanna reflects on who she is and what has truly happened to her.