In “The Return,” her latest contribution to the junkyard of this decade’s horror movies – all pale green tones and no payoff – she hides under beds, she screams at jump-cutty visions, she sifts through dusty file folders that may later reveal something of a shock.

Funny how after seven years of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, a role conceived purportedly to smash the distressed-damsel template, Gellar now chooses films like “The Grudge” or “The Return,” clunky thrillers in which her characters exist entirely to uncover a long-ago mystery that couldn’t concern her less and, yes, investigate strange noises upstairs.

It’s unfortunate the way this coulda-been film turned out, because “The Return” has no gimmick to hang our hat on – no creepy “Ring” tape, no freaky “Grudge” kids – and it’s refreshing. The script does seem genuinely interested in Gellar’s character, Joanna Mills, a loner-type traveling businesswoman with a history of self-mutilation. You get the sense that “The Return” is striving for something – what’s the phrase? - character-driven.

The searing problem? There’s hardly any character here to drive a farm wagon.  

Who is Joanna Mills? Five minutes in, we get a flashback of 11-year-old Joanna stalked at a carnival by a shady-looking ruffian. Fifteen minutes in, we’re treated to shots of Joanna driving, set to voice-over informing us of how lonely, how transitory she is. Twenty-five minutes in, she’s mysteriously drawn to a quiet Texan town (read: ominous!), sifting through those reliable file folders, investigating strange visions she has that – while pretty to look at – we could not care less about.

There’s no entry point for the audience to grasp onto Joanna Mills, a woman who may or may not be supernaturally connected to a past that may or may not involve a denim-clad brooder named Terry (Peter O’Brien), who may or may not be connected to a rape/murder victim who haunts Joanna’s dreams.

As a character-centered thriller, the film never finds a center, never gives us the courtesy of revealing the central question its wants us to gnaw on. “The Return” instead demands that we be fascinated by the mere dot of the question mark for 90 whole minutes.

The film might have been supported by a next-to-crumbs budget, but it isn’t visually incompetent. Its meditative cinematography suggests a deliciously bleak atmosphere, and the standard suspense pieces are filmed with the handheld herky-jerky style that, despite every genre’s current penchant for it, works quite well here. (In the jump-scare department, “The Return” pulls a neat twist on the old face-in-the-mirror gag.) Not much else can be said, though, in the way of “The Return” as a solid story worth sitting through.

Sarah Michelle Gellar sports a jet-black ‘do for “The Return,” assumedly to announce her growth as a performer, as someone to be Taken More Seriously. The effect is a depressing irony: she was much more engaging, much more of a character as the platinum blonde teenybopper who refused to wear the Damsel in Distress badge that her “Grudge” and “Return” counterparts are curiously content – proud, even - to don.

C.J. Arellano is a film critic living in Chicago.

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