Starring Ivan Dobronravov, Vladimir Garin, and Konstantin Lavronenko. In Russian with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

An ominous aura hangs over The Return, a magnificently glowering new movie from Russia, and one that evokes Soviet cinema at its greatest.

It's challenging to attach exact meanings to the elegant simplicity of The Return, which details a fishing trip with two boys and their father. The lads--the skeptical Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) and the gentler Andrey (Vladimir Garin), about 13 and 15 years old, respectively--are lost in the world of early-adolescent competition and contemplation. On the day we meet them, however, their summer-vacation spell is broken when they go home to their impassive-seeming mother (Natalya Vdovina), who tells them to be quiet because daddy is sleeping. The only thing strange about that is that they haven't seen their father in a dozen years.

Why the unnamed figure, played unforgettably by Konstantin Lavronenko (who is also magnificently glowering), left home, why he came back, and what he did in between--although he has the naturally arrogant bearing of a career soldier, or criminal--are questions that are left tantalizingly unanswered. The tale, which could be about a father teaching his sons survival skills or about the collapse of Stalin's police state, works equally well on levels of brute physicality and poetic metaphor. Comparisons with Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky will be hard to avoid, but first-time director Andrey Zvyagintsev (working from the very spare script he wrote with two others) has his own eye for biblical allegory and disorienting shifts of scene and mood. The constantly inventive camera work of Mikhail Kritchman is a major advantage, as is moody music combining modern electronica with ancient Slavic folk tunes.

The Return was filmed, on a very low budget and with a palette of bleak browns and lush greens, on the Gulf of Finland and massive Lake Lagoda, although place names, dates, and other facts of taxonomical life are never mentioned. The only landmarks, really, are the towers that begin and end the movie. And what do they represent: places to let one see past the flat horizon or watchtowers from which to menace an imprisoned population? Either way, they are frightening places that somehow cannot be avoided.

It adds a kick in the gut to know that Garin, the older and more open-faced of the boys, drowned in a swimming accident just after filming was completed. The movie spends most of its time in or near the water, and it's as if the sea just couldn't let its swimmers go.