Joel Edgerton
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The sins of the high-school cafeteria come home to roost in “The Gift,” a coolly unsettling thriller that begins as an unironic homage to late-’80s/early-’90s yuppies-in-peril dramas like “Fatal Attraction” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” before taking a turn toward the moral and existential minefield of Michael Haneke’s “Cache.”
The television spots and trailers sell the film as a stalker thriller akin to films such as Pacific Heights and Fatal Attraction.
In staging that setup, Edgerton -- who makes his writing and directing debut behind the camera while also appearing in front of it -- harkens back to the domestic intruder thrillers of the 1980s and '90s -- such as "Pacific Heights," "Fatal Attraction" and so on -- where a seemingly good-natured and friendly enough person turns into a living nightmare for those he or she bugs, stalks and ultimately terrorizes.
"The Gift" is a tight little thriller that recalls the good old days of "Fatal Attraction" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," back when suspicious packages appeared on the doorstep, no affair went unpunished, and the family dog was never safe.
The Gift recalls the stalked, terrorized or targeted yuppies of Fatal Attraction and Pacific Heights.
The astute horror fan might think they can anticipate what comes next; likely something in the vein of Fatal Attraction or One Hour Photo, where a deranged sociopath infiltrates a happy family and slowly tears it apart through manipulation and violence.
Anyone old enough to remember Michael Keaton, Matthew Modine, and Melanie Griffith in John Schlesinger’s yuppie horror effort Pacific Heights will catch a similar vibe in what Edgerton is after.
The television spots and trailers sell the film as a stalker thriller akin to films such as Pacific Heights and Fatal Attraction.
In staging that setup, Edgerton -- who makes his writing and directing debut behind the camera while also appearing in front of it -- harkens back to the domestic intruder thrillers of the 1980s and '90s -- such as "Pacific Heights," "Fatal Attraction" and so on -- where a seemingly good-natured and friendly enough person turns into a living nightmare for those he or she bugs, stalks and ultimately terrorizes.
The Gift recalls the stalked, terrorized or targeted yuppies of Fatal Attraction and Pacific Heights.
At face value, Edgerton’s film about a suspicious oddball intruding upon a married couple’s carefully manicured life sounds akin to serviceable stalker schlock like “Pacific Heights,” “Unlawful Entry” or “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”
This is no basic Hollywood thriller like, say, John Schlesinger’s Pacific Heights (1990).
Elements of the script are certainly familiar; Michael Haneke's psychological thriller "Cache" is one possible reference point, and there's a sinister final plot development that goes all the way back to Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (as well as Bruce Norris' play "Purple Heart").
The sins of the high-school cafeteria come home to roost in “The Gift,” a coolly unsettling thriller that begins as an unironic homage to late-’80s/early-’90s yuppies-in-peril dramas like “Fatal Attraction” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” before taking a turn toward the moral and existential minefield of Michael Haneke’s “Cache.”
He fills the spaces between the shock points with interesting, stirring topics — from cutthroat competition in the corporate sphere, to how little we know about those closest to us, to, as in “Cache,” the arrogance of the privileged.
No es que El regalo se inspire explícitamente las películas de Park Chan-wook y Jaume Balagueró (tampoco el director parece haberlas citado en ningún momento como referentes), pero la superposición de ambas propuestas nos lleva a un terreno muy cercano a los temas que trata el film que nos ocupa: de OldBoy , El regalo recogería la idea del pasado como una ola funesta que descarga contra el presente de un personaje (en ese sentido, otra posible ancla sería el Caché de Michael Haneke).
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992)
Directed by Curtis Hanson
influenced The Gift (2015)
Themes Plot
The sins of the high-school cafeteria come home to roost in “The Gift,” a coolly unsettling thriller that begins as an unironic homage to late-’80s/early-’90s yuppies-in-peril dramas like “Fatal Attraction” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” before taking a turn toward the moral and existential minefield of Michael Haneke’s “Cache.”
"The Gift" is a tight little thriller that recalls the good old days of "Fatal Attraction" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," back when suspicious packages appeared on the doorstep, no affair went unpunished, and the family dog was never safe.
At face value, Edgerton’s film about a suspicious oddball intruding upon a married couple’s carefully manicured life sounds akin to serviceable stalker schlock like “Pacific Heights,” “Unlawful Entry” or “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”
To divulge much more might spoil a superior film in an overworked genre once heavily populated by the likes of "Fatal Attraction," "Pacific Heights," "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" and other domestic thrillers.
Faster than you can say Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the socially stunted Gordo starts showing up unannounced and staring into the wraparound windows of his old schoolmate’s pricey hillside home.
It winds up having more in common with “Rosemary’s Baby” than, say, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” being a deeply empathetic look at a woman being slowly dehumanized and used by unseemly forces, in this case by men who aren’t always aware of the evil forces lurking inside them.
Thematically, The Gift is reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which is also about a young, emotionally fragile, but fundamentally decent young woman who discovers that she is married to a man whose egocentrism and desire for personal success drives him to commit heinous deeds.
Recovering from a miscarriage, she’s beset by strange dreams and bad vibes, with which Edgerton infuses a “Rosemary’s Baby” sort of dread.
She’d make a mean Rosemary of Rosemary’s Baby.
It winds up having more in common with “Rosemary’s Baby” than, say, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” being a deeply empathetic look at a woman being slowly dehumanized and used by unseemly forces, in this case by men who aren’t always aware of the evil forces lurking inside them.
At one point, the film seems like it might be moving in the direction of a classic psychological female thriller in the vein of “Bunny Lake is Missing,” or “Repulsion,” where female emotion is pathologized and mocked.
At face value, Edgerton’s film about a suspicious oddball intruding upon a married couple’s carefully manicured life sounds akin to serviceable stalker schlock like “Pacific Heights,” “Unlawful Entry” or “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.”
It's the kind of setup that's typically employed in the context of an entertaining yet far-from-fresh "blank from hell" thriller (eg The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Temp, Unlawful Entry, etc, etc) and yet writer/director Edgerton does a superb job of ultimately subverting one's expectations, as The Gift, though saddled with a rather familiar opening hour, eventually moves into a third act that's riddled with impossible-to-predict surprises and plot twists.
That's the superficial starting point of The Gift, the directorial debut of actor Joel Edgerton, who takes the cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller template – which became ubiquitous in the early '90s with films like Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – and, by introducing psychological depth and a streak of social conscience, fashions an intriguing morality tale.
While competent and compelling, Boy Erased doesn't offer much that's different from The Miseducation of Cameron Post, another film on the same topic from earlier this year, although it's very different in tone from 1999's But I'm a Cheerleader, which co-starred RuPaul and gave the material a campier sheen.
Where But I’m a Cheerleader used an exaggerated representation of conversion therapy to make its point, this film uses sincerity and realism to deliver its meaning.
If you like this, try: “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” and “But I’m a Cheerleader”…
And the satirical 1999 film But I’m A Cheerleader remains the exemplar of non-documentary conversion camp dramas.
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Boy Erased (2018)
Themes Characters Plot
The trouble with such films — really, with any story set in a rigidly conservative institution, be it a mental hospital (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), boarding school (“Dead Poets Society”), boot camp (the first half of “Full Metal Jacket”), or conversion program (“The Miseducation of Cameron Post”) — is that they inevitably feel like prison movies, falling back on reductive tropes (like the idea that the authority figures are hypocrites) to make the case that the only solution is to break out.
“Fake it till you make it,” says an authoritarian ex-inmate figure (Flea, in the prototypical R. Lee Ermey role from Full Metal Jacket ) as he instructs the teens to take a combative stance, then has them ranked according to “manliness.”
The scenes set at Love in Action are so by the book that you just assume one of the kids will be abused by a sadistic counselor and another will be so Full Metal Jacketed by the dehumanizing doctrine that he'll off himself by Act 3.
Bateman brings his smug persona to the fore, and at times he could be auditioning for an English remake of Fassbinder's Martha , playing a domestic tyrant who hides his domineering nature behind false indulgence, always getting his way with a thin smile and a way of phrasing a command to sound like what Simon wants is what Robyn wanted all along.
The Golden Age of Stylish Movies About Stalkers commenced with “Fatal Attraction” in 1987 and ran through the mid-1990s, with films such as “Pacific Heights,” “Single White Female,” “Sleeping With the Enemy,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” “Bad Influence,” “Disclosure,” “Fear,” “Unlawful Entry” and wow there were a LOT of movies back then with posters featuring good-looking humans and their good-looking tormenters.
And thanks to Edgerton for pointing out, in a Q&A following the press screening, his directorial prank of paying homage to Rodney Ascher's cult documentary Room 237 (a geek-o-rama examination of Kubrick's The Shining) by putting that number on every office door in the movie.
The Golden Age of Stylish Movies About Stalkers commenced with “Fatal Attraction” in 1987 and ran through the mid-1990s, with films such as “Pacific Heights,” “Single White Female,” “Sleeping With the Enemy,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” “Bad Influence,” “Disclosure,” “Fear,” “Unlawful Entry” and wow there were a LOT of movies back then with posters featuring good-looking humans and their good-looking tormenters.
Edgerton's subtle, unnerving performance ranks up there next to Anthony Perkins' classic portrait of an emotionally unbalanced Norman Bates in "Psycho."
Through the halfway mark and even beyond, audiences should find “The Gift” an ensconcing creep-fest, hearkening back to madman mood pieces like “Cape Fear” (Scorsese’s version in particular) and “Psycho,” with a touch of director David Fincher (the modern day master on obsession put to film).
That's the superficial starting point of The Gift, the directorial debut of actor Joel Edgerton, who takes the cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller template – which became ubiquitous in the early '90s with films like Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – and, by introducing psychological depth and a streak of social conscience, fashions an intriguing morality tale.
The "platonic friendship" brand of fatal attraction thriller is typically reserved for films with female leads (think Single White Female or The Roommate ), so the "male-on-male" obsession in The Gift is an interesting twist on the formula.
It's also a throwback to the sub-genre sometimes known as the "intimacy thriller", which flourished in the late 1980s and early '90s, the era of Fatal Attraction, Single White Female and Cape Fear.
To describe much more of the plot would be to rob the viewer of one of The Gift’s many pleasures—its constant ability to surprise—but suffice it to say: Edgerton begins by hitting all of the beats familiar to fans of Fatal Attraction, Single White Female and their countless imitators, but it becomes obvious early on that he’s not going to play by their rules.
The Gift is more European in tone and story — something along the lines of Dominik Moll’s With a Friend Like Harry… (2000), to which it bears more than a passing resemblance.
Like so many movie stalkers before him Gordo is relentless and clever (think of him as a nerdy version of Robert de Niro’s Max in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear from 1991 and you have a sense of the chill factor Edgerton hits.)
(One of the producers is the prolific Jason Blum, and there’s something noteworthy about how much of his work — the Insidious and Paranormal Activity series, Sinister, The Purge, this — is wrapped up in the basic fear of someone or something in one’s home without permission.)
But “The Gift” cannily avoids conventional catharsis while doing enough to quench a casual audience’s thirst for comeuppance; in that regard, it’s reminiscent of “Changing Lanes,” another thoughtful morality play that transcended marketing materials that made it look like slick junk.
The astute horror fan might think they can anticipate what comes next; likely something in the vein of Fatal Attraction or One Hour Photo, where a deranged sociopath infiltrates a happy family and slowly tears it apart through manipulation and violence.