Return to Sender (2015)

Rosamund Pike is often hailed as a great actress but I find her smug in every movie she's in.

From the first few scenes, to the last scene, she's smug.

Basically this movie is about a rape, and how the character Pike aims to put her life back together again.

The dialogue is slow. The acting slow. And the revenge 'meh'. I Spit On Your Grave, this is not.

Nick Nolte co-stars but is wasted in the role of Pike's father.

All in all, this movie is nothing more than a TV movie, the sort of thing you'd tuned into around 3pm in the afternoon.

I could have been better but it lacks punch.

Fmovies: While this movie had a huge amount of potential it ended up being a "WTH" kinda' watch. The movie starts off and for a second I forgot the movie was a thriller since it had a bit of a comedic start. It's slow and then I think I missed something, and then the climax happened. I was re- intrigued!! But touch me in the morning and walk away but I must have missed something......again. I'm a committer so I couldn't bring myself to turn it off for hopes it would re-intrigue me and what do you know it did. But touch me twice and walk away twice..........the ending SUCKS a big-timer! I implore you to join my misery and watch the movie anyway. Feel my pain and understand my dis-in-trigue!!

The single nurse Miranda Wells (Rosamund Pike) is preparing to become surgical nurse and is buying the house of her dreams. Miranda is very close to her father Mitchell Wells (Nick Nolte) that is helping her to fix her house to sell it to raise the necessary money to buy the other house. One day, a colleague schedules a blind date with a sweet man called Kelvin. Miranda is still getting dressed when she sees a man on the porch. She assumes that the man is Kevin and invites him in, but he is actually a rapist that rapes her. When the real Kevin arrives, he finds Miranda in the kitchen and calls the police. Miranda identifies the rapist William Finn (Shiloh Fernandez) that is immediately arrested. When she recovers, her life turns upside down since nobody wants to buy her house and she can not be a surgical nurse since her right hand has tremors after the rape. Out of the blue, she writes a letter to William but the letter returns to her. She insists on sending it and when she receives a reply, she goes to the prison to visit William. When Williams is released, he is welcomed by Miranda in her house. What is happening to Miranda?

"Return to Sender" is a flawed thriller about a woman that sees her life partially destroyed after a rape. The Brazilian title is a spoiler since discloses that it is a story of revenge. However the plot is flawed since there are many evidences that Miranda had visited William in the prison and might have witnesses seeing the man working at her house. Therefore, in case of any investigation of his disappearance, Miranda could be a suspect since she has the motive. There are more smart means of revenging. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Sede de Vingança" ("Thirsty of Revenge")

Return to Sender fmovies. Return to Sender did have some potential, a subject that is hard-hitting and easy to relate to and Rosamund Pike and Nick Nolte are watchable in a lot of their work. Return to Sender has some decent assets, but overall is pretty messy and like a missed opportunity.

Pike is nowhere near as good as her deservedly Oscar-nominated performance in Gone Girl (a far superior film, no matter how polarising it is, and Amy is much more interestingly written than Miranda), but she still plays the role with charisma and an appropriate iciness. Shiloh Fernandez has his unsure moments but mostly suitably sleazy, but the film's best performance comes from Nick Nolte, whose sympathetic performance gives a glimmer of emotional backbone and his character is the one character and asset that is halfway credible. Return to Sender is reasonably well-filmed too and fits the atmosphere well with some nice shots.

The rest of the cast reads of acting like wooden marionettes, and none of the characters are fleshed out are often underwritten. Apart from some of the camera work, the production values are generally too TV-film quality and the direction is lazy and confused, showing a lot of inexperience in the genre, a lack of suspense and a lack of ability to make the narrative cohesive. The script is illogical, predictable and completely lacking in realism, the way it flows and is delivered also never feels natural. The story is all over the place and doesn't know what it wants to be, it does agreed feel like three different films and it does little with the second and third acts, the first act actually does have a little tension and some genuine sympathy for Miranda.

However, the character study second act has some far too pedestrian and lazy pacing, far too wooden and underdeveloped characterisation (with the exception of Nolte) and emotional impact is minimal (only provided by Nolte). And the third revenge act is sorely devoid of tension or suspense, increasing predictability to the extent that you're exclaiming 'we knew it!' and suffers from Miranda's actions not being believable for a second. The ending is very rushed and even the open feel felt abrupt and under-explained, it is also rather brutal and any sympathy felt for Miranda in the first act is completely diminished here.

Overall, messy (with the biggest offender being the story) and a missed opportunity, with its moments (the performances of Pike, Nolte and Fernandez, some nice shots and a decent first act). 4/10 Bethany Cox

Miranda (Rosamund Pike) is a nurse who's got it all it seems -- her own nice house, a loving supportive Dad (Nick Nolte), a stable career about to go the next level. One day, a lecherous stranger William (Shiloh Fernandez) gains access into her house and rapes her. As her neat little world comes crumbling down around her, Miranda embarks on a novel form of "therapy", in the hope of recovering from the brutal trauma she suffered.

A rapist is not only a sexual assaulter, but also the ultimate bully and power-tripper. A rape victim is violated not only sexually and physically, but also psychologically, mentally and even spiritually. What may be a few minutes of torture will haunt a victim for a lifetime.

Powerfully rich in dramatic pain and torment, rape and its aftermath had been the topic of thousands of films and TV shows. Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" (1950) and Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" (1960) are both Oscar-winning classics of World Cinema. "Johnny Belinda" (1948) and"The Accused" (1988) have won Best Actress Oscars for Jane Wyman and Jodie Foster respectively. But no, before you expect too much, this film definitely does not have Oscars in its future.

Lead star Rosamund Pike shot "Return to Sender" BEFORE her Oscar- nominated turn in "Gone Girl". There is a lot of her "Gone Girl" performance here as well -- the subtle mysterious boiling under her cool-as-ice exterior. The strange script makes her do a lot of illogically unexpected, supposedly therapeutic activities, and Pike does them with her game face straight on. Seeing her make these puzzling decisions, we are as frustrated as her father Mitchell was in the film.

Shiloh Fernandez was clearly up to no good the moment we see him on screen. He has got a raw roguish look about him that makes him work as this vile character. Nick Nolte is now all grandfatherly and Santa Claus-like with his white beard and body heft, playing MIranda's father Mitchell. This is so unlike how I last remember him during his prime in the 1990s in film like "Cape Fear" or "The Prince of Tides."

Watching "Return to Sender" felt like watching three different short films which were just tenuously connected to each other. The final act was so predictable yet still so maddening because it never really showed us clearly what happened. We will be expected to interpret the scene in our own way. I am sure those who have invested time to follow the movie to this point may not exactly relish this disappointing ending. 4/10.

Return to Sender is a thriller starring Rosamund Pike fresh off her role in Gone Girl which earned her an Oscar nomination. Now although she didn't put in a bad performance in this film, she wont be getting any nominations for this. The plot of this movie was just a complete mess, it kind of had a purpose for the first 15 minutes and looked like it could be a promising film but for the entire rest of the film i had no idea what was happening or why it was happening. Everything about the film just felt very weird and you couldn't like Rosamund Pike's character because of the ridiculously dumb decisions she makes for reasons that you don't understand. Just thinking back on the film there was zero character development for anyone at all for the majority of the film, it is just a series of events that seem to happen then the film moves on to another irrelevant scene and it keeps on doing this until you are bored out of your mind.

The film also decides to take a very odd turn in the last act just out of nowhere. All of a sudden the film decides to throw a curveball with absolutely no setup and no foreshadowing that it just seems very out of character. The terrible writing of the plot and characters really let the film down, you cannot get behind any of the characters and everything just seems ridiculous. In the end The directing wasn't bad and was shot pretty well and Rosamund Pike did her best to use her acting talents to try and save the film but it just wasn't enough to save this messy bore-fest. - 3.9