The Gift

Director: Joel Edgerton
Writer: Joel Edgerton
Stars: Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall, Joel Edgerton
Strength: Great Thriller, Story, Acting
Weakness: Long runtime
Runtime: 108 minutes
Rating: 3.5/5

Plot: A young married couple's lives are thrown into a harrowing tailspin when an acquaintance from the husband's past brings mysterious gifts and a horrifying secret to light after more than 20 years.

Review: Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall play Simon and Robyn, recently relocated from Chicago to a spacious modern house nestled in the hills of L.A.'s East Side. Robyn is recovering from a miscarriage and subsequent depression; Simon is climbing the corporate ladder at a new job.

Refreshingly free of expository frills, The Gift gets right down to business with Simon and Robyn running into an old high school classmate of Simon's, the amusingly named Gordo (Edgerton, sporting orange-ish hair, an earring and ill-fitting flannel), at a store. "That was awkward," Simon whispers to Robyn as they walk away, but soon enough Gordo is invited for dinner and the three are exchanging pleasantries over plates of pasta in a quietly unnerving scene shot mostly in alternating facial close-ups.

Things get weird, as they always do when a quirky outsider bonds with a couple of shiny, happy yuppies in these films. It starts innocuously enough with a bottle of wine sent as a thank-you, then takes a more unusual turn when fish appear in Simon and Robin's once-empty backyard mini-pond. Before long, Gordo has turned into an incorrigible unwanted-gift giver, violating all codes of new-friend etiquette and prompting the slick, somewhat snarky Simon to nickname him "Weirdo."

Edgerton, who wrote recent Australian noirs The Square and Felony, has a somewhat cut-and-dry approach to plot and character but the writer-director knowingly plays on our familiarity with tropes of the genre, both stylistic and narrative. 

The Gift is the work of a sure-handed craftsman who knows how to keep a story moving and when to tighten the screws. Even at its most routine, the movie offers the pleasure of Edgerton's own superbly creepy performance, which could easily have devolved into ghoulish revenge-of-the-nerd caricature, but instead turns Gordo into a simultaneously pitiable and unsettling figure — a dejected adolescent frozen in time.

Reviewed by Intisab Shahriyar