The Gift, film review: Look out, there's a stalker about

An unexpected, unpredictable and profoundly unnerving psychological thriller
Feeling rattled: Jason Bateman in The Gift
Guy Lodge7 August 2015

Joel Edgerton’s best performances — whether as an MMA-fighting family man in Warrior or a steaming Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby — have betrayed a kind of watchful intelligence. No surprise, then, that he’s also a filmmaker to be reckoned with.

The Australian makes an auspicious directorial debut with this unexpected, unpredictable and profoundly unnerving psychological thriller, beginning with an efficiently familiar home-invasion set-up before wickedly testing the genre’s usual yuppie sympathies. It also makes what might be the cinema’s best use to date of Jason Bateman, brilliantly playing both sides of his glib everyman appeal.

Simon (Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall — superb) are a well-to-do dream couple, newly moved into a Los Angeles showhome. They want a fresh start after some unhappy business in Chicago, though the sharply cornered script takes its time revealing just who the more dysfunctional partner in the marriage is.

Their regained bliss, however, is cut short when they bump into Simon’s long-estranged schoolmate Gordo (Edgerton, his beefiness neutralised behind a doleful goatee and dated earring), whose excessive welcome-to-theneighbourhood gestures suggest he remembers their friendship somewhat more warmly than Simon. Or perhaps not, as a rattled Robyn finds herself caught between opposing accounts and her own possible paranoia.

Past and present indiscretions clash to disquieting effect in a film that, for its occasional — and cruelly effective — jolts of horror, plays on the quieter insecurities we carry with us from childhood, even those we think we’ve left behind.

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