This "Odyssey" came out in 2024, starred two Oscar nominees (one winner), and played to near-empty theaters despite critical acclaim.

While Iphigenia (1977) gave us the beginning of the beginning of the journey, THE RETURN (2024) gives us only the end - the part after the monsters. No Cyclops. No Sirens. No Circe. No gods at all.

Director Uberto Pasolini cut every supernatural element out of the poem and kept what was left: a soldier washing up on a beach after twenty years of war, so wrecked by it that nobody on his own island knows his face.

Ralph Fiennes plays Odysseus, war-weary and starved to the bone. Juliette Binoche plays Penelope, holding a house full of men circling her husband's throne. It is the first time the two have appeared onscreen together since The English Patient (1996).

Pasolini shot it in Corfu and the Peloponnese with almost no visual effects. Real coastline, real stone, no army of digital ships.

The screenplay was the last thing Edward Bond ever wrote. Bond wrote Saved in 1965, the controversial play whose banning ultimately helped end theatre censorship in Britain. He also wrote the English dialogue for Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). Bond died in March 2024, six months before this film reached its first audience.