'The Gift' keeps on giving us the chills
WHEN it comes to gifts, they say, it’s the thought that counts. And so it is with ‘ The Gift’, a surprisingly intelligent and effective (if slightly pulpy) psychological thriller from actor Joel Edgerton, making his feature debut as a writer and director. Both off- screen and on — where he plays an unsettlingly creepy, stalker-ish figure who insinuates himself into the lives of a married couple (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall) — Edgerton makes his presence felt.
Behind the camera, it is with a restrained yet highly suspenseful script, strong cast and a mood of genuine fear. In front of it, Edgerton’s Gordo, a damaged, secretive — and possibly vengeful — former high school classmate of Bateman’s character, feels disturbingly, hauntingly real.
That’s essential, seeing as Gordo is required to do some things that strain credulity, to put it mildly. After a chance meeting in the checkout line of a Los Angeles store, for instance, where he recognises Bateman’s Simon — who has just returned to town from Chicago with his wife, Robyn, recovering from a miscarriage — Gordo begins inundating the couple with increasingly strange housewarming presents: a bottle of wine, a spray canister of glass cleaner, a DVD of “Apocalypse Now” and several fish for their unstocked koi pond.
Edgerton not only makes these awkward, random- seeming gestures palatable to Robyn, who sees him as a kindred broken spirit, but he also makes them plausible to us as well. He’s no stock villain. In fact, as the story unspools towards its deeply satisfying yet ambiguous conclusion — a twist that is both solid and open to interpretation — it’s not entirely certain whether Gordo is the film’s villain.
On more than one level — the theme of seething psychopathology that sometimes lurks just below the veneer of normalcy, for instance — ‘ The Gift’ may remind some viewers of ‘ Gone Girl’. Yet it avoids that film’s lurid and, to my mind, unnecessary violence. When this film gets physical — and it does so only rarely, and with fists — it’s in the service of character, not sensationalism. It’s a horror story in which the fear is more cerebral than visceral.
Bateman and Hall are impeccable in their roles, with Simon manifesting a depth and potential for depravity that belies Bateman’s reputation for playing superficial smart alecks, and with Hall painfully evoking Robyn’s fragile emotional state.
The singular title of ‘ The Gift’ suggests that Gordo still has
After a chance meeting in the checkout line of a Los Angeles store, for instance, where he recognises Bateman's Simon — who has just returned to town from Chicago with his wife, Robyn, recovering from a miscarriage — Gordo begins inundating the couple with increasingly strange housewarming presents: a bottle of wine, a spray canister of glass cleaner, a DVD of ‘Apocalypse Now' and several ish for their unstocked koi pond.
a whopper coming for Simon and Rebecca, not counting his earlier tokens of appreciation. And you could argue that that’s true. After every present is unwrapped — and all the film’s secrets have been brought to light — the couple are left sitting with something I can’t describe, except to call it a sense of grotesque, tantalizing and almost tragic uncertainty.
That’s the film’s real gift, and we its grateful recipients. — WPBloomberg
* Three stars. ‘ The Gift’ (105 minutes) is rated R for obscenity, sexual references and a fistfight or two.
* Ratings Guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.