THE RETURN (Andrey Zvyagintsev)

Andrey and Ivan see their lives interrupted by the reappearance of an absent father, a stranger. The film follows these three characters and their relationship during a journey to a remote island, where the father seeks to teach them how to be men.

A boat sunken at the bottom of the sea. The image appears as a premonition, but also as a promise: something that fell, something left unsaid. From there, the film seems to tell itself backwards, as if it were already a memory.

Sunday

Two brothers. A group of friends. The challenge of jumping from a height. Masculinity, understood as courage, as a public test. “Chicken” is the word that hurts the most. Not an insult, but a verdict.

Ivan doesn’t jump. Andrey does. The difference between them is not just character; it is a different way of inhabiting absence. The mother tries to protect, dramatizes, runs, and saves. But she fails at something harder: giving trust. She contains anxiety, but does not transform it.

The house is almost empty. No decoration, no clear traces. As if roles had evaporated along with the absent father. When he returns, he sleeps. Occupies space, but fills nothing. No one can sleep that night. The children, from the anticipation of the trip. The mother, for something more opaque: sharing a bed with a man who is the father of her children, but we don’t know if he is still her partner. There is a sense of formality, as if intimacy were suspended, leaving only function.

The editing does not progress classically. It links moments as nodes. Images seek each other, like echoes that will only make sense at the end.

Monday

The rejection of friends. The rejection of the brother. Betrayal. Ivan runs to accuse, and Andrey pursues him. That childish chase leaves a mark that will return later. In this film, nothing is lost: everything comes back transformed.

The father is a stranger. He generates curiosity and mistrust. He will not explain where he has been. He only proposes a journey. The mother seems to know more than she says, but keeps silent. And in that silence, the question settles: what do you do with a father who returns?

Tuesday

“Call me father,” he demands of Ivan. As if the name alone were enough to make the role exist. As if a word could replace the experience.

Andrey, who had idealized this figure, begins to give in. He adapts. Ivan does not. Ivan observes his father looking at other women and experiences it as a betrayal of his mother. Idealization crumbles quickly when the real body appears.

The children have grown without clear limits. They confuse freedom with absence. The father responds with firmness. Strong hand. Rule. Punishment. But none of the three fully understands what it means to be a father or a son. Andrey submits out of a desire to belong. Ivan resists because he cannot bear imposition. Two ways of facing symbolic emptiness.

How can one trust that this man is really his father? Is blood enough?

Wednesday

Andrey has something contemplative. He takes photographs. Senses that moments do not repeat. Wants to fix them. Ivan is more impulsive, more sensitive to the bond. That makes him vulnerable in a world that rewards strength.

Ivan seeks to return to calm, to the mother, to safety. There is something in him that still does not want to leave home. Andrey lets himself be guided, as if the journey were an opportunity to become something.

The father constantly teaches. Gives lessons even when nobody asked for them.

Thursday

They build a boat. Physical labor. Rain. Rowing without rest. More than a trip, it feels like training. A camp where law is imposed without nuance. There is no individuality in this pedagogy. Only duty.

The island functions as isolation and as a test. Tempering character. Endurance. Survival. Masculinity appears as survival: strength, courage, silence. It is not questioned in a pamphleteering way. It is shown in its rawness.

The cold tones, at times exaggerated, those blue shadows with bright orange highlights, are not an isolated aesthetic effect. They are felt on the skin. The world is inhospitable. Tenderness barely has space.

Friday

Some images evoke Tarkovsky’s Mirror, but here memory is not lyrical; it is harsh. It feels as if Ivan is narrating from the future, trying to understand what happened.

The father begins to appear monstrous. Not because he is evil, but because he embodies an excess of law. In the final chase, Ivan flees. Prefers emptiness over unrecognized authority. From the tower, he threatens to jump.

The father tries to save him. He falls.

But here arises an uncomfortable question.

If his intention was to teach them to “be men,” why did he not begin with the most basic form of manhood: taking responsibility for his children? Why is the teaching reduced to physical endurance, toughness, obedience, and not to permanence, care, and sustained presence?

There is something contradictory in demanding strength when one has practiced absence. In demanding character when no example of responsibility was offered.

Then doubt sets in: are we facing a dysfunctional paternal role, or a man who confuses masculinity with imposition? Is it law… or simply wounded pride?

The fall mirrors the initial image. Trauma closes in on itself.

Saturday

The brothers are left alone on the island, as they were alone in childhood. Only now something has been inscribed. The father dies as a body, but densifies as a figure.

We do not know where he was. We do not know why he returned. We do not know if it was fair or excessive. We know he left a mark.

The journey was neither romantic nor pedagogical in a gentle sense. It was material. Painful. Vulnerating. The teaching did not come through words, but through experience.

But that experience leaves an ambiguous inheritance.

Because if the masculinity transmitted is to endure, to remain silent, to resist, where is affective responsibility? Where is the capacity to sustain over time?

Perhaps the father does not fail for being harsh.

He fails for trying to institute a law without first being present.

And yet, something is transmitted.

Not necessarily the model he wanted to impose, but the question itself.

In the end, when the boat sinks and the body disappears, what remains is not the man, but the problem.

The father dies as a physical presence, but is born as a question.

And that question is not only about how to institute law without repeating violence.

It is also this:

What does it really mean “to be a man” when the first responsibility — to be — was not fulfilled?

The Return (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2003)