homophobia

About That Twist in The Gift

Rich Juzwiak · 08/10/15 01:14PM

At one point in the middle of Joel Edgerton’s The Gift, I thought to myself, “This movie is playing me like a violin.” It is taut throughout and includes one of the most suspenseful cinematic scenes in recent memory. It’s gorgeously shot. It juggles potential misdoing among multiple characters for a good chunk of its running time, casting suspicion and then retracting it over and over again, up to the last frame. It does that vicariously infuriating thing that the best domestic thrillers do by making its ostensible antagonist’s harassment of the protagonists seem obvious yet completely unprovable to authorities. Maybe what I responded to the most was that it’s a throwback to one of my favorite sub-subgenres, the late-summer/early-fall domestic thrillers of the ‘90s like Single White Female and The Good Son (as well as What Lies Beneath, to an extent, though it doesn’t have that film’s supernatural bent). What sets it apart from those low-key classics is its firm social consciousness.