It’s about 18 minutes into The Gift and I am screaming “Oh shit,” so loudly that the entire theater is laughing and the woman next to me tries to put her hand on my knee to comfort me. It’s the second time this has happened; it’s not the last. But while the jump scares in this Jason Bateman vehicle are plentiful, it’s the movie’s message that is more terrifying than any crazed stalker could be.
On the surface, The Gift is a classic stalker movie. A couple moves into a house; a couple runs into a mysterious old acquaintance; said old acquaintance, of course, turns out to be a psychotic obsessive bent on revenge. Yet beneath that—beneath the violence, the screams, and the broken windows—the movie is a heartbreaking story of the effects that bullying can have on both the victim and the perpetrator. It’s a film as much about pain’s ability to linger, how hurt doesn’t dissipate when childhood is over but festers, turning into something both primitive and human.
As the movie hurtles from one twist to another (none spoiled here upon threat of death by editors) it stops being a “whodunit” and becomes sort of a naked keening, a jumble of raw nerve endings on display, each character both inflicting and absorbing more and more pain.
The Gift’s premise is simple: A married couple named Simon and Robyn (played by Bateman and Rebecca Hall) move back to a small town in California. While shopping for furniture for their new house, they run into Gordon (played by Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed the film), someone Simon knew in school. While Simon’s reluctant to start a friendship with Gordon—whom he refers to as “Gordo the Weirdo”—Robyn’s intrigued about Simon’s past.