REVIEWED - THE RETURN: Much has already been written about Andrey Zvyagnitsev's bewitchingly sinister début, a winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film festival, and almost all of it has touched on the continuing legacy of another Russian director: Andrei Tarkovsky.

While The Return's quietly devastating second half - composed of dark, slow-moving sequences whose restraint cannot lessen their bravura magic - has much of the late master's contemplative brilliance, it nonetheless manages to take us to previously unvisited places. Shaped like a thriller, its compositions sometimes explicitly modelled on familiar paintings, this watery nightmare announces the beginning of an unnervingly promising career.

The film begins with young Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov, hypnotically intense) sitting atop a tower by a lake being urged to jump into the water by his elder brother, Andrey, and some friends. Terrified both of failure and the drop, he remains huddled in the foetal position until his mother (the translucent Natalia Vdovina) comes to comfort him and to remind him that, at least for a day or so, he is at an age where a parent's love can annihilate all troubles. Shortly thereafter the boys' glowering, insensitive father (Konstantin Lavronenko), who has been missing (and up to no good we suspect) for many years, turns up in the middle of the night and the atmosphere darkens. When dad suggests going on a fishing trip, Andrey, older and already becoming part of the conspiracy that is adulthood, is keen whereas Ivan, who isn't entirely sure that this man who shares his mother's bed is who he says he is, becomes ever more tightly knotted with angry (oedipal?) resistance.

Zvyagnitsev uses the grammar of suspense to craftily build tension and the film appears to be inexorably drifting towards some gruesome finale. The father is eager to retrieve a mysterious package hidden on an island and to do so he has to dig a hole just about big enough in which to bury two young boys. We eagerly anticipate the waving of bloody hatchets, but when the expected crisis eventually arrives it is altogether more confused and less melodramatic than we might have feared. The last few minutes - draining, emotional, oppressive - prove to be as bleak a metaphor for the end of childhood as the cinema has seen since The Exorcist (there, horror fans should be aware, the similarities end).

- Donald Clarke