Return to Sender

Stars: Rosamund Pike, Shiloh Fernandez, Nick Nolte, Rumer Willis, Scout Taylor-Compton, Illeana Douglas

Director: Fouad Mikati

If Pike makes any more clunkers like this to follow up her Oscar nomination, she really will be a gone girl in no time flat. Unbelievable from about 20 minutes in, right down to the end, the film takes an unconscionably long time to get where it's going, which is somewhere in the vicinity of a Stephen King chiller.

Pike plays a nurse preparing to move away from her hospital and from her irascible store-owning father (Nolte, gruffer than ever), whose dog persists in attacking her.

An attack of a considerably more serious nature occurs when Pike agrees to a blind date and is confronted by unkempt Will (Fernandez) - can this really be her smartly-dressed date? - whom she unwisely invites in before he seizes and violently rapes her, inflicting considerable physical damage, not least to her face.

After a period of shutting herself away, Pike begins writing to Will in prison; when he finally responds, she visits him. On his parole, she asks him to help with renovations to her house, which she has been unable to sell, on account of her notoriety as a rape victim. 'It don't make any sense at all,' grumbles Nolte, and he's right. But more heavily over-directed silliness is to follow...

Apart from all this, Fernandez' dialogue is difficult to follow, except when he's on the prison visit-phone, when it's downright impossible. Pike's own character is dangerously close to the one she played in Gone Girl, but without the script. She's better as a sunny-dispositioned nurse and then a rape victim that she is as an aggressor.

She's not helped, though, by the clumsy direction of Mikati, whose only decently-made scene is the rape at the start.

Watch, if you must, for one-time star Ryan Phillippe as a delivery man. But blink and you'll miss him.

David Quinlan

USA 2015. UK Distributor: Arrow Films. Colour (unspecified).
97 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 18.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 2, Drugs 0, Swearing 2.

Review date: 15 May 2015