The Return: Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche bring ferocity to this stripped back reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey

Uberto Pasolini’s reworking of The Odyssey shuns spectacle to craft a potent, grown-up character study that mines the emotional core of Homer’s epic. Adapting just the poem’s second half, The Return depicts Odysseus’s reappearance on Ithaca after two decades away and explores the effects of war on those who f ight in them and those left behind.

Here, there are none of the famous wanderings: no resisting the songs of sirens; no blinding of the Cyclops; no transformations into pigs at the hand of Circe. Instead, the f ilm begins with Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) being shipwrecked on the shores of his own island and, while disguised as an unfortunate beggar, nursed back to health by his former slave Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria). From his anonymity, he observes the sorry state of his kingdom, while his mourning queen Penelope (Juliette Binoche) and their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) suffer at the hands of the haughty suitors, led by Antinous (Marwan Kenzari).

Eschewing the fantastical voyages not only allows Pasolini to ground his version of the story in a more realistic setting but brings the psychology of the characters to the fore. The audience has not witnessed this Odysseus being blown from pillar to post by supernatural winds or waylaid by mythical creatures; instead, his absence feels born more of anxiety about his homecoming. In becoming a man of war he has been scarred, and he is fearful of the reception he will receive; arriving back on Ithaca alone, with so many of its sons lost under his command. Though handsomely mounted in beautiful locations, the filmmaking is as stripped back as the narrative. The cinematography is elegant and understated, so that Pasolini can allow his actors to do the talking.

Binoche and Fiennes are both imperious. Penelope is sometimes dismissed as a two-dimensional ideal of wifely fidelity, but in Binoche’s hands she has complexity and cunning. Consumed by longing and grief, she nonetheless resists the suitors, Binoche’s tearful eyes also filled with steely resolve. Meanwhile, Fiennes’s eyes flit around the room, sketching the constantly whirring cogs of the mind that devised the Trojan Horse but also the unease of a man plagued by his past and uncertain of his future. Pasolini’s film is built around their dynamic. It’s their interplay in spartan rooms and amid the chiaroscuro of flickering firelight that elevates The Return to a nuanced psychological drama that is both unflinching and gripping.

► The Return is in UK and Irish cinemas now.