2013 was the year for Saturday Night Live alums to break out of their comedic roles to star in smaller indie dramas. First there was Will Forte who set aside his MacGruber impersonations for a more serious father and son road trip film in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. In Hateship Loveship it’s Kristen Wiig who boldly steps outside of her wheelhouse of wise-cracking joker (Bridesmaids, Knocked Up) for a role in which she barely cracks a smile. Unfortunately, her transition is not quite as smooth or effortless as Forte’s, though the uninspiring material doesn’t do her any favors.

The story begins as a painfully shy personal caregiver named Johanna (Kristen Wiig) must find a new client after the elderly woman she was looking after passes away. She is referred to the McCauley household to look after a teenage girl named Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld) who has lived with her grandfather (Nick Nolte) ever since her mother passed away. As expected from a rebellious teenager, Sabitha is standoffish towards Johanna from the beginning and eventually exploits the caregiver’s gullible and delicate personality.

From the moment Sabitha’s estranged father Ken (Guy Pearce) arrives on-screen the film attempts to subtly reveal his backstory of addiction problems, but the moments are so deliberately presented that they feel forced. In Johanna’s first interaction with Ken, she finds him stealing prescription pills for which he awkwardly asks her to look the other way. In the very next scene Johanna learns that Ken’s wife passed away and that Sabitha’s best friend is not allowed to get a ride from him. Immediately following that scene, Johanna overhears an argument where Ken is shouting, “It was an accident!” As if it wasn’t obvious enough that he killed his wife while driving under the influence, a gossiping bank teller informs Johanna that he spent time in prison for “what happened”. Each time Hateship Loveship tip-toes around the obvious, it becomes more and more cringe worthy.

It’s frustrating that so much exposition is given to characters other than its main star. It’s easy to see Wiig is a sexually repressed woman, in the film’s best scene she passionately makes out with herself in a mirror, but it’s never revealed why she acts the way she does. She comes off as a flat two-dimensional character incapable of expressing any emotions, despite enduring some colossal ups and downs. Even Pearce, who is normally excellent, has trouble making his out-of-control junkie character seem convincing.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to tell that Hateship Loveship is adapted from a short story. There’s simply not enough material to call for a full-length feature, even the best moments were only mildly interesting and very short-lived. Not only does the film derive from a stifling script full of predictable outcomes, but it also dedicates too much time toward its minor subplots (like Nolte’s relationship with the bank teller), while skimming over important details like marriage and pregnancy. Perhaps Hateship Loveship would have been better suited as a short film, or maybe it should have just remained a short story.

Hateship Loveship trailer

It’s a concept we’re all familiar with: a soldier comes home from war and finds it difficult to readjust to normal life. So what is it that makes Return something we’ve never seen on screens before? In her debut feature film, Liza Johnson interestingly subverts the typically expected gender roles of this genre, giving us a strong female lead in Kelli (Linda Cardellini). With so many soldiers being women these days, it seems about time.

Clearly displaying that she appreciates just how much this topic has been dealt with, Johnson makes a point of avoiding many of the cliches we’re used to. There are no flashbacks to the war, no moments of hysterical crying or yelling – and in perhaps the bravest move of the film, no drama. Kelli is rather against talking about her time in the Middle East, a trait that we come to see as fairly unhealthy. Her girlfriends are full of questions, eager for her to open up in the belief that it will be a cathartic experience for her, but Kelli refuses to be the victim. “There were a lot of people who had it a lot worse than me,” she repeats, as though it’s something she has programmed into herself in order to get by. But when she casually says “I wasn’t raped, assaulted, or bullied, like a lot of women; I had it good,” one of the most poignant lines of the film comes almost in the form of a throwaway. Her matter-of-fact tone and the sheer lack of gravitas it’s given mean it rings with truth – this isn’t something she says for the attention, but something that is so genuine it’s barely worth mentioning. Here, in the understated simplicity and the chilling honesty, lies the beauty of Johnson’s film.

Everything about Cardellini’s performance screams muted power, and it’s done with great effect, conveying all of her emotions through a filter: a chronic detachment to the world around her. But her supporting cast are frustratingly underused, particularly Michael Shannon in the role of her husband Mike. While it’s nice to not simply see an age old story from a different perspective, the focus on Kelli becomes a little dull, making it harder to feel an emotional connection to any of the other characters. We can sympathize when Kelli seems to go through the motions of daily life in a robotic manner, but even her husband seems really quite humdrum. He’s neither great nor awful at anything, but instead entirely average. Her friends seem shallow and obsessed with trivialities to the point of irritation. Her job, and the characters that come along with it, are also tedious – but would stapling various pieces of metal to each other have been interesting before the war? It’s not really a surprise that she’s bored when she comes back; she should have been bored before she left.

It doesn’t help that Johnson’s fallback events are alcohol issues, marriage troubles and custody battles. Among well written lines, such quintessential events in a returning soldier’s life make the script seem disjointed and lacking in depth; they take something vital away from the truly moving moments, such as when Kelli spontaneously sleeps on the floor of her children’s room. There are so many of these silent, tender scenes that convey Kelli’s internal struggle far more effectively than something as predictable as her getting a DUI, but Johnson tries to force a basic progressive plot on what is otherwise an interesting dilemma. Her saving grace is the unexpected yet surprisingly believable twist in the second half, making it so much clearer to see just how hopeless Kelli’s situation is. I won’t reveal too much about it, but it’s an interesting way to bring home the despair felt by this woman – it removes the distance of her reality by making her seem more vulnerable.

Kelli is transformed by her time away – that much is clear. But we as an audience never see what life was like before she left, instead having to guess at it from her current interactions. This, paired with the two-dimensional nature of the other characters, makes it difficult to feel emotionally involved in the film; we’re often left wanting to feel more but just unable to. Return may have its flaws, but it is nevertheless a refreshing take on a sensitive topic. The problem is that no matter how powerful Cardellini’s performance is, a silent sufferer taking so much of the screen-time just doesn’t do enough to pull on our heartstrings.