The Return

A father who has been gone for years reappears without warning to his two sons and takes them on a fishing trip to a remote lake and island. What begins as an awaited reunion becomes an ordeal of unexplained rules, tests and silences, and the trip ends in loss.

The film is a taut Oedipal drama of paternal authority, longing and dread, in which the boys both need the father and cannot bear him. For a therapist it dramatises the ambivalence of the father-son bond and the weight of an absence that returns as a demand. It won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003.