ABSTRACT
Praised for its elegant and eloquent understatement, Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return portrays a journey to an uninhabited island undertaken by two teenage brothers, Ivan and Andrei, with their taciturn and demanding father, who has returned home after a twelve-year absence. This chapter explores how the film's opening mise-en-scene is demarcated as a distinct informational domain with clear temporal and spatial boundaries, and shows how the information contained within that domain represents this traumatic experience. Zvyagintsev's unambiguous partitioning off of this material allows one to see the journey that follows as a fantasy produced by Ivan to resist the psychic reorganization required to assimilate the trauma. Some critics have raised questions about the status of the father's return. Understanding that the father is an Abrahamian symbol in Ivan's fantasy is a definitive response to these concerns; indeed, the third narrative segment in the film confirms this interpretation of the central narrative and indirectly of the introductory scenes.
