The Return(2003)

When Joanna (Sarah Michelle Gellar) returns to the small Texas town where she grew up, she begins to understand that her lifelong nightmarish visions have something to do with the murder of Terry’s (Peter O’Brien’s) wife Annie (Erinn Allison). She eventually receives enough psychic “clues” to deduce that the garage-owner Griff (J.C. MacKenzie) is the killer. In Griff’s junkyard, she finds the knife that he used to stab Annie. Unfortunately, Griff sees her and chases her all of the way back to Terry’s barn (where Griff originally assaulted Annie). Terry attempts to intercede, and while Griff is beating Terry, Joanna stabs and kills Griff.

In a scene set a short time later, Terry and Joanna go for a drive, stop at a remote intersection, and the viewer is filled in on the missing backstory. On the night that Annie died, Terry found her critically injured and bleeding in the barn. He was driving her to the hospital when he crashed into the station wagon containing an 11-year-old Joanna and her father Ed (Sam Shepard) at this very intersection. Joanna appears to have died from her injuries caused by the crash, but when Annie stops breathing, Joanna opens her eyes again, implying that Annie’s spirit has been inhabiting Joanna’s body ever since that night, seeking justice for the killing.

An alternate DVD-only ending shows Ed and his pregnant wife in the station wagon, pulled over to the shoulder, with her in labor. Joanna is then *born* just as Annie dies. As the scene flashes back to the present, Joanna and Terry share a romantic kiss. This was probably discarded for good reasons. First, while it was hard enough to swallow that Terry hadn’t appeared to age a day in the 14 years since Annie died, stretching that timespan out to 25 years makes suspension of disbelief pretty much impossible. Second, that kiss is a real “eeewww” moment, given a 25-year age gap between the couple.