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 recognizes 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 toward 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 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.
“The Gift”
Rating: R, for obscenity, sexual references and a fistfight or two.
Showing: Alderwood, Cinebarre Mountlake Terrace, Everett Stadium, Marysville, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Sundance Cinemas Seattle, Cascade Mall
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