Michael Ledo
Miranda (Rosamund Pike) is a small town nurse and cake decorator. She is cool, calm, and calculating and lives alone. She is overly occupied with the thoughts of germs, and dreads sharing a pen. Her friend hooks her up with a blind date (her ex). By coincidence another man, William Finn (Shiloh Fernandez) shows up at her door and rapes her. The only way things could get worse is if her dad was Nick Nolte. with a dog..and it was.William goes to prison and Miranda has trouble functioning as a twitch has developed in her hand. Strangely, the distressed victim visits her attacker in prison, apparently some kind of odd therapy.For some reason I didn't see the overly predictable end coming. Rosamund gave us an excellent performance in a what qualifies as a low budget "B" drama/thriller.Guide: F-bomb, rape (from behind and brief)
jtindahouse
I'm sitting here having watched 'Return to Sender' and I genuinely don't know what to think. I'm not even sure whether I enjoyed it or not. I could justify giving it a '3' and I could equally justify giving it a '9'. It's my kind of movie first of all. I love the 'revenge' genre. This is an odd case of that genre though. In fact I wasn't even sure it was that type of movie until 4/5 of the way through, despite the movie poster heavily implying it. It's not a particularly well made movie, at least technically. The sound engineering is poorly done in certain scenes. Every scene involving the prison phones is incredibly hard to hear the dialogue in. It chops in and out and is often inaudible. The story is choppy and alienates the audience at times by leaving them clueless as to what the point of this all is. And yet through all this, I was having a pretty good time watching it (I think).Rosamund Pike is a very fine actress and has the chops to carry a movie (as she proved in 'Gone Girl'). She's again pretty good here, and with a stronger script could have accomplished a performance on par with her one in 'Gone Girl' (the two roles are actually strikingly similar). It's hard to explain exactly what an odd experience 'Return to Sender' is to someone who hasn't seen it. Would I recommend this film for someone to watch? I'm still not entirely sure. The only thing I can say is watch it to see what I mean.
mistoppi
I saw the trailer for this film last year and I thought hey, that reminds me a lot of Gone Girl. Of course it's slightly different, for example, Gone Girl is written better. But it has similarities, like Rosamund Pike. Her character seems to be Amy from Gone Girl - again! I've read it a million times online and I can now say it myself, the plot of Return to Sender is pretty standard. I don't even usually watch movies where the two main themes are rape and revenge, because they tend to go the same way over and over again. Return to Sender has it's differences, mostly the character of Miranda, who I'm going to talk about later. But the thing is those little details don't matter that much when the plot has been repeated million times. The character, Miranda is interesting in a lot of ways. She seems likable, but it's hard to say why. She has friends and she's a nurse, so clearly there's something nice about her. There also seems to be something off about her. She seems to be very careful about few things. She seems very distant to the viewer. When she starts visiting the rapist, she seems even more distant. We see what makes her go to him, but we still don't know the exact reason. Of course we can guess it, because it's easy to expect that, but still it's very confusing for a moment. The thing about Miranda is that she seems to be this nice nurse but you can't help but feel there's something weird about her. Trust that instinct. But that's what makes her character more interesting - except that she's now too close to Amy. If Miranda had been played by any other actress, maybe that connection wouldn't be so easy to make. Of course she is good at playing this kind of characters. Rosamund Pike is good at being weirdly and calmly scary. And the movie is timed very well. It's not exactly a long film, but the weird relationship between Miranda and William kept going for a while, so I almost thought I had figured the movie out all wrong. Well, I wasn't wrong, but making that even that one small moment longer made it feel like wait a minute, what is going on? That's one important thing about structure - you change something in the usual timed structure of the film and it feels weird, because we are so used to that typical tempo.What's mostly wrong about it is the timing. People weren't over Gone Girl when this one came out, so obviously everyone is starting to compare it to Gone Girl in their heads. And comparing to Gone Girl, Return to Sender doesn't stand a chance.Return to Sender is worth a watch, if you haven't seen too many "rape & revenge" type of movies, or if you really like them. If you're bored with them, then it's not for you.
