CREEPY PASTA
The film The Gift (written, produced, and directed by actor Joel Edgerton) will kill your soul, trust me; it’s got one of the most downer endings I think I’ve seen in a while. It’s an interesting film, because of the way it treats audience expectations: It treats them as tools it can use to tell its story and leave you stunned at the end.
Spoilers? Spoilers. Be an adult and read anyway.
On the surface, this looks like any number of slickly-made thrillers. Jason Bateman plays the cocky and sarcastic Simon in what you’d expect to be the standard Jason Bateman role. Rebecca Hall plays his apparently fragile and sweet wife, Robyn. Moving to California from Chicago for a “fresh start,” they run into Gordo, an old high school classmate of Simon’s who’s a little awkward and a little too eager to reconnect.
At this point, just about everyone in the theater assumes they know how this movie will go: Gordo will insinuate himself into the pretty couple’s lives, they will try to be nice, they will assume he is harmless, and by the time they realize he’s not harmless it will be too late: He will have learned their passwords, copied their keys, and framed them for crimes. In the end Simon will have to engage in horrific violence to defend his family and defeat the evil weirdo.
The movie knows that’s your expectation. It knows you expect Gordo to be insane and uber-competent until he makes one major mistake that is his downfall. It knows you will assume Simon, for all his urbane wittiness and aloof sarcasm, will be the hero by the end, and fragile, sweet Robyn will find her own inner grit as she helps her husband defeat the weirdo that invades their lives.
Yeah, not exactly. Which is to say–kind of? But Edgerton is smarter than that. He takes these expectations and plays us all for fools.
JUMP SCARES A-GO-GO
Edgerton plays with the audience in a variety of ways, using a lot of misdirection to ramp up the tension in this story. One of the simplest things he does is to waste a few jump scares — those hoary old tricks where you get the audience to pay close attention to the screen, make everything super quiet and tense with the rising music, and then toss something into their faces, like, say, a serial killer. Edgerton uses two jump scares in the film’s first half, but what’s great about them is they don’t actually mean anything. They’re literally like someone sneaking up behind you and making you jump out of your skin, then walking away, giggling. And then he never uses jump scares again. It’s a way of tweaking your expectations and getting you to doubt your movie-watching instincts.
Something else he does is use one of the classier thriller clichés, the glass house with Very Specific Architecture. Simon and Robyn live in one of those mid-century homes with glass walls, and Edgerton takes us on a few tours of the place to ensure we know the layout. He plays with old tricks like characters wondering if they left doors open, or water running. He gives us every reason to assume this information about the house is going to play into the climax, because why else waste screen time showing us their home and how it works? Except Edgerton, laughing, does absolutely nothing with this set up. He again gets us to expect something with our vast knowledge of every film ever made before this one, and he pulls the rug out from under us.
SIMON SAYS I’M AN ASSHOLE
Edgerton also plays with our expectations about the characters, which we assume will fall right into the usual thriller template of slightly uncool nice guy, his loving, overly trusting wife, and the weird, violent force of chaos. Edgerton doesn’t precisely re-invent these characters, but he orients them to the left of what you expect. Simon isn’t just the typical nice-guy-with-acid tongue Bateman role — he’s literally an asshole, a lifelong bully who makes fun of people and sees nothing wrong with using anger, dirty tricks, and smarmy bullshit to get what he wants. He’s a sociopath, really; he even mocks his own pregnant wife when she discovers some nasty things about him, and as we learn more about his relationship with Gordo and his past actions, the characters almost trade places, with the Force of Chaos becoming the Hero and vice versa.
Almost, because Edgerton is also too smart to simply switch up who’s good and who’s bad. Gordo certainly has plenty of reason to hate Simon, yet in the early parts of the story is arguably making a real (if slightly demented) effort to be an adult and let bygones be bygones. When Simon’s raging assholery makes this impossible, Gordo does get weird and angry and destructive, and he does in fact do some damage to these people. But instead of the expected violent confrontation — probably set in the glass house we’ve been educated about so carefully — Gordo sets about doing something far more twisted and evil — and unexpected.
Robyn is also a twist on expectations, because you expect her arc to be a transformation from a too-nice weakling into a kick-ass Final Girl type, perhaps. And while Robyn does seem to have the most pure moral center of anyone in the film, she never has a big hero moment, she’s never redeemed or punished. She simply goes about making the best decisions she has available to her, and at the end of the film she is almost completely unaware of the role she played in Gordo’s revenge (which is, in a word, absolutely fucking horrifying, and her complete lack of awareness makes it more so).
The Gift isn’t a revelation or a reinvention of the form, but it is one of the smartest dark thrillers I’ve seen in a while. I highly recommend anyone who is interested in telling stories well take a gander. Just watch out for those jump scares: They sneak up on you. And if you do see it, sit for a moment and ponder the various definitions of “the gift” in the story, including in Gordo’s revenge. You’ll be sad you did.
….. Enjoyed’d