The Return

The Return (2024) is a historical drama by director Uberto Pasolini — watch it online on iFILM. Twenty years of war and wandering end when Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washes up on the shore of Ithaca: gaunt, weathered, unrecognisable. The film takes Homer's Odyssey as its source but strips away the heroic frame — what remains is the story of a man whose long absence has made him a stranger in his own kingdom.

Penelope (Juliette Binoche) has spent those years holding off suitors who have occupied the palace and are pressing her to choose a new husband and king. Their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) grew up without a father and has no reason to trust the worn-out stranger who appears at the gate. Marwan Kenzari plays the most threatening of the suitors. Odysseus moves through his own home in disguise, reading the room before he makes any move — because one wrong step ends everything.

Pasolini shoots this deliberately slowly, with no battle sequences and no spectacle. Fiennes carries the film through physical restraint: this is a man for whom the homecoming is harder than the fighting ever was. The co-production spans France, Britain, Greece and Italy, with location work that grounds the myth in something palpably real. Stream The Return (2024) online on iFILM.