Linda Cardellini’s my favourite kind of actor – she gives quiet, nuanced performances and looks like a real person. And here she stars in my favourite kind of trailer – relatively plotless, with many cuts and minimal dialogue. In the timely Return, Cardellini plays a woman who comes home from a tour in Iraq to find that the life she left isn’t there anymore.

War movies generally don’t do a lot for me. Movies in which people return from war, however, can be emotional goldmines! Or landmines…

Kelli (Cardellini – Brokeback Mountain, Freaks & Geeks) is a wife and mother struggling to return to her “normal” life after her military service in The Middle East. She comes home all ready to pick up where she left off in the small town where she grew up: “I really want things to be like they were before I left” she laments. But it seems it doesn’t work like that. Her husband can’t relate to her, her children need her, birds are flying around her head, the machinery at work makes loud noises… It’s all happening here, in an indie way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKdbRxlygz8

Oscar-nominee Michael Shannon (Take Shelter, Boardwalk Empire) can be counted on for a solid, sombre turn as Kelli’s husband, despite the weird hair he’s sporting in the film, and John Slattery plays Kelli’s truck-driving romantic interest. I know Slattery more for the offbeat roles (30 Rock, Mad Men) in which he completely shines, so I’m interested to see how he goes here as the straight man.

Return premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to generally favourable reviews and near unanimous praise of Cardellini’s performance. There’s some criticism that the film’s just retreading ground which has been recently covered, but I’m pretty sure that with Cardellini in the lead, Return won’t fail to take us some place new.

Would you watch it? What’s up with Michael Shannon’s hair?

When Kelli returns home from war, she expected to slowly but surely settle back into her life with her husband and kids in the small town she grew up in. But she gradually realizes that the life she left behind is no longer there waiting for her.

Written and directed by Liza Johnson, Return stars Linda Cardellini, Michael Shannon and John Slattery.

Return hits American theaters on 10 February, with no New Zealand release date just yet.