Critics reviews

There may not be a more limited comedy star in America than Jason Bateman, who has parlayed his TV resurrection into a one man-cottage industry, producing one thin, stale slice of milquetoast after another. And yet he's excellent in Joel Edgerton's not-uninteresting thriller The Gift, probably because this is the first time that a director has mined his boring normalcy for dread and resentment.

Even if you aren't aware that Australia's Blue-Tongue film collective, who are behind this yuppie-paranoia thriller, have carved a niche in clever genre subversion, you'll remember that Faulkner saying about the past.

Here Edgerton, who has honed his craft penning The Square (2008), Felony (2013) and The Rover (2014), has taken a subgenre normally associated with cheap sensationalist thrills and stripped it down to intense character drama.

For a film seemingly anchored around the perception of its lead female character, it's surprising that Rebecca Hall's Robyn so poorly utilised, reduced to a pawn in a man's game, simply fueling conflict between Simon and Gordo. The plot toys with her sympathies to Gordo relative to her husband's but, on the whole, she's largely denied autonomy until the film's ending, by which point the gesture is utterly fruitless.

Simon speaks the language of any person who presumes himself to be entitled to do anything and have everything. What Edgerton does with that entitlement is apply uncannily satisfying restraint. His simple blank-from-hell movie culminates in what feels like allegory (that's the only way most of the behavior here makes sense). Everything is up for grabs, not just who's the blank — but what, under these circumstances, is a fitting definition of "hell.

We think we're in for a routine home-invasion thriller, but Edgerton takes the story in unexpected directions. Bateman gets to do something other than play affably flustered, Hall is on steely form playing detective, and Edgerton's Gordo hovers to discreetly creepy effect, while Eduard Grau's widescreen camerawork makes tense use of the cold, polished spaces of the couple's dream home.

Joel Edgerton's The Gift starts out like so many other thrillers before it – with an attractive, well-to-do couple purchasing a big new house – and then beats its own, uniquely tense and twisted path from there. It never flinches from that path, either... It's that rarest of psychological thrillers: one that actually lives up to the words "psychological thriller.

Edgerton does a fine job as director, and shows a refreshing lack of vanity by removing Gordon for the middle stretch of the movie, which also proves to be its highlight. All we see is his lingering impact on Robyn and Simon's relationship, and the film is full of little stylistic choices that create a sense of unease in Simon and Robyn's home.

[Gordo's] odd-ness is hard to define. Is it the flat look in his eyes? Is it the mystery around why he keeps showing up, why he leaves wrapped gifts at the door, why he even wants to strike up a friendship at all, when Simon seems to barely remember the guy? What's Gordo up to? What does he want? One of the intense and disturbing pleasures of "The Gift," why the film creates such a sense of unease, is that the answers to those questions are just the tip of the iceberg.

The Australian makes an auspicious directorial debut with this unexpected, unpredictable and profoundly unnerving psychological thriller... 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.

Without giving too much away, The Gift's various deceptions and reversals are of a type that would occur far more readily to someone who performs in movies than to someone who watches them. Films regularly use costume, class and camera angles as storytelling shorthand, for instance, and The Gift repeatedly misleads us with all three, playing with conventions that we're normally only vaguely aware of, if at all.

Edgerton is more interested in exploring the darker reaches of human culpability, regret, and compassion — and in building and sustaining a simmering tension — than in loading up on gore or violence. What he comes up with is subtle, sinister, and surprisingly effective, particularly in the way it views men who stomp around importantly, busy with their various pissing contests and the general business of running the world.