The Gift (2015)

I went into this movie with modest expectations. I was thoroughly entertained for most of the movie as this movie builds and maintains your suspense masterfully. It has just enough ambiguity and creepiness to keep you on the edge of your seat. Also, I thought all of the actors/actresses played their roles very well. That was what I liked about the movie.

Now let's get to why I rated it a 3 out of 10. While I thought this had sind serious potential, it just never really delivered. You kept waiting for it to really get good and you kept your hopes up until the credits started rolling and you realized that nothing actually really ever happened in this movie. You waited and waited and nothing. Without giving anything away, the big secret of the husband's past is not nearly as twisted as you hope it will be, which kind of just kills the movie when you realize there isn't more to it. I don't know why everyone is praising this movie. I left the theater a very disappointed customer. Hopefully I can set more realistic expectations for anyone who reads this review so that don't go into this movie expecting a "movie of the year" like I did after reading the reviews.

Fmovies: 'The Gift' marked Joel Edgerton's directorial debut. He also wrote and starred in the film alongside Rebecca Hall and Jason Bateman. For a first time director, this is a very solid, admirable and promising piece of work.

Edgerton's writing is intricate. He interweaves a number of themes together very well while creating a general structure. First of all he uses the premise of the past actions having a huge bearing on the present. The film delves into the theme of bullying and how much of an impact bullying can have on the victim throughout his/her life. Edgerton takes this concept of bullying and merges it with the work culture in the modern corporate world. He shows how people who were once bullies during their school days can continue with their bullying in their professional work to be successful. Edgerton's film is a bit of a damning indictment on corporate culture where these bullies and their bullying get rewarded more often than not.

When it comes to direction, Edgerton has a great sense of how to use an enclosed location to amplify the tension, because at the heart of it, 'The Gift' is a thriller that thrives on the creation of tension. Edgerton uses the house that Simon and Robyn move in to brilliantly in the tension-filled scenes. I also noticed some subtle use of blocking that he uses. Specially in the kitchen scenes, there is a bit of a rectangular opening in the wall which gets uses quite subtly whenever there is a argument happening between husband and wife. However the moment in the film that stayed with me will be an image that comes very early on in the film. As Robyn and Simon are checking out the different rooms in this new house that they are considering to move into, there is a shot where we see Robyn and Simon facing each other with a glass sliding door separating them. Simon slides open the door and Robyn moves out the door to join Simon oh his side and walks off. This moment in a thematic sense, is a foreshadow for the whole film and it's a brilliant moment.

The acting is also very good. For me the best performance in the film comes from Rebecca Hall. She shows the right amount of grace, likability and vulnerability to portray the character of Robyn and sells her paranoia very convincingly. Jason Bateman once again shows that he can be so much more than just a comedic actor. He showed this in 'Disconnect' and now in 'The Gift' he again shows a different side to his personality. Edgerton himself plays the character who initially seems like the typical creepy outsider who'll haunt the couple, but as the film progresses, the film slowly reveals certain aspects of his character and the film somewhat subverts some clichés.

'The Gift' is a bit like the lighter, non-flashy, a little more grounded version of 'Cape Fear'. It does not achieve greatness, but it is certainly a solid, well made thriller especially considering this is Edgerton's first outing as a director. Recommended.

"You may be done with the past but the past isn't done with you.", one of the many creepy and subtly sinister lines out of Joel Edgerton's brilliant directorial debut. The Gift is the definition of a sleeper hit. It has all the right things going for it, a great cast, a great script and the potential to be a future classic. What starts off as a slow burn thriller, giving the audience enough exposè to make us really connect with these characters and sympathize with every single one of them then slowly turns into a new age Pacific Heights. The film pits Simon and Robyn, two newlyweds that have just bought a house in Simon's hometown. While out shopping, Simon runs into Gordo, a guy from his high school days that is a bit off and at that moment, the film takes off and we're given enough twists and turns to constitute this as shocking to say the least. Actor and, now, director Joel Edgerton knocks this film out of the park, making this a home run for it being his directorial debut. Hell, if this was his tenth film, it'd be a home run. Edgerton directs his screenplay and actors with such confidence, you'd think Adrian Lynn directed it. The three leads in Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall and Joel Edgerton couldn't be more perfect. Bateman delivers a career best performance, ditching his recent string of light comedies and applying his condescending attitude towards the yuppie entitlement in Simon. Rebecca Hall, who has yet to deliver a bad performance in my eyes, makes this no exception. She's fantastic in this film. Joel Edgerton also proves extremely eerie as Gordo and for someone to pull off the perfect trifecta such as Edgerton, it puts him in the same league as Ben Affleck. This is a fantastically twisted potboiler film that needs to be seen. The Gift stands as single handedly the best film of the summer and one of the very best of the year.

The Gift fmovies. The 90's was the golden age of highly stylized stalker thrillers with flicks like Basic Instinct, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and the actor-turned-director Joel Edgerton hearkens back to those films with his directorial debut The Gift. In The Gift, young charismatic Simon runs into an old high school acquaintance named Gordon, and after a painfully awkward conversation, they go their separate ways. Simon's wife, Robyn, thinks it's just a chance encounters while Simon wants nothing to do with "Gordo the Weirdo." Gordon then slowly starts inserting himself into their lives and brings to light secrets about Simon's life, and Robyn realizes that she doesn't know who her husband really is. The thing that makes The Gift so unpredictable is the ambiguity of the villain. Initially, we think that Gordon is the villain since we seem him suddenly become too clingy and start stalking the couple, but as the plot progresses, Gordon reveals several secrets about Simon that make Simon seem like the true villain. Each secret revealed about Gordon and Simon twists the plot even further but not so much that it causes the film to meander through its story. This is a very controlled movie. None of the suspense comes from big chase sequences or any real action; it's the revelations about the characters that keeps you on the edge of your seat. The Gift is a surprisingly well-crafted and intense thriller film that feels like a throwback to the best 90's stalker flicks.

Billed as a mystery and a thriller, Joel Edgerton's The Gift is indeed both of those and more. The sub genre might be "home invasion" of a figurative and a real kind, reminiscent of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Equally so it's a home horror film, for some of the traditional tropes of that genre are in place (e.g., missing dog, running faucet) waiting around the corner of any room so to speak.

Super security salesman Simon (Jason Bateman) is happily married to interior designer Robyn (Rebecca Hall). Their new LA home is wall to wall windows, all the better for bad forces to look in and to ironically comment on the lack of transparency inside the home as well as a security expert's vulnerability. Then Simon's old high school friend, weirdo Gordo (Joel Edgerton), visits with gifts and memories of a troubled past.

Their home is indeed invaded, not just by nerdy, strange Gordo, who has a bad habit of showing up at odd times and gaining access at even odder ones, but by the past, which is creeping up on the couple despite Simon's will to leave it all behind and Gordo's to "let bygones be bygones." The film bears its tensions well, distributing its exposition of the past in the present slowly.

The Gift doesn't just give the present a chance to come to terms with the past; it also comments on privacy, security, and bullying while serving up a fine stew of ironies and suspense. As for bullying, not the first time in a thriller, it plays out from high school days to adult days in a surprisingly subtle way, forcing us over the long haul of the film's 108 minutes to see it lurking like a clichéd ghost or murderer.

Marriage is also a subject in this taut film, namely how much do we really know about our partners or anyone close to us? This film could make anyone a skeptic about the goodness of your fellow travelers. Speaking of which, Gordo is the outsider, whom writer Flannery O'Connor liked to write about because "he changes things." Gordo is an agent of change, an avenging angel of the past and a messenger for the future.

Smart thriller for late summer.

The Gift follows married couple Simon and Robyn who get a unexpected encounter from Gordo, an acquaintance from Simon's past. At first, Simon doesn't recognize Gordo, but after a troubling series of uninvited encounters and mysterious gifts, a horrifying secret emerges. Little do they know that their perfect lives are about to be thrown into a terrifying tailspin.

This film standing as Joel Edgerton's directional debut, I must say is pretty impressive. This was a well crafted thriller put together by Edgerton, it wasn't as predictable as most thrillers are these days, it was simply one where our expectations keep getting pummeled to ground from how the story keeps transitioning.

Everyone in this were simply astonishing, Edgerton played such a compelling creepy loner with so much aplomb, Hall played her role perfectly as a depressed woman that can't stress enough with all the fear and for Bateman, coming from his comedic standpoint, simply impressed as the husband with one troubling past. Round of applause to each and everyone!

The film builds an effective sense of suspense and disbelief, you don't know what to believe from all the turn of events. The story was told so fluently with the suspense, is wasn't cheap or hasty but more chilling and grim when it came to the very well paced manner, it doesn't simply spoonfeed us with everything it's doing but really lets us take the turn for worst with each surprise hiding at each corner.

The Gift was simply a shot in the dark when it let loose from the formulaic genre it was hanging off of. This nerve-wracking thriller maturely sends this main couple spiraling out of control as Edgerton simply starts to turn their life upside down by downgrading their relationship piece by piece. You can never tell who's the main protagonist, Is It Bateman? Is it Hall? Is It Edgerton? You can't really seem to tell until the surprise-filled ending that takes a wonderfully warped take on long-ranged karma. The Gift most certainly gave deliberate pacing, believable characters, and masterful understanding of cinematic suspense, Edgerton really proved that this film shouldn't be the last present we receive from him.