The Gift (2015), R, ★★★1/2

Joel Egerton looking at Rebecca Hall and Jason Bateman.

You're a 30-40-something adult with great success in the present as you are happily married to your wife, have a great house and have a great job. Everything is working in favor of you and with some good luck, maybe enjoy a great retirement. To get a job and have a fortunate skill, a person has to have skills, creativity and likability to make that human being a part of a team at home and at work. But, what would happen if something in your past comes back into your life and it comes back to disturb and annoy you in a way? Just be kind, be adults. With this movie, however, the trailer makes it seem like another cliched-ridden thriller, but thanks to Joel Edgerton, it is a movie that is so tantalizing and twisted that you will not predict whatever is coming in the final minutes of the movie.

Simon and Robyn Callum (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall) are spouses who moved to California, recovering from an unfortunate miscarriage. They acquire a nice home near the place Simon used to live in and they decide to settle in. While getting furniture for their new house, a man approaches Simon and claims to know him from high school. Simon does not recognize him initially until he says that his name is Gordon Mosely (Joel Edgerton) or Gordo, which Simon calls him.

Gordo drops off a bottle of wine on the couple's doorstop as a welcoming gift and it encourages Robyn to invite Gordo to stay for dinner. A little too drunk from the wine, Gordo uncomfortably applies "Simon Says..." to all the nice values he has in life when Simon used to campaign running for class president. Simon does not approve of Gordo visiting them and crossing the phone number off his list and calling him weirdo. And that bothers Gordo as he gives another gift of koi fish and installing a TV with cable.

Simon and Robyn go to a really nice home where Gordo supposedly lives and he tells them that the other couple had to cancel. During conversation, Gordo tells them that he is not married. But when a phone call erupts, he returns and admits that he lied and he is divorced. Simon makes rude comments about him to Robyn while they are home alone. Robyn suspects that Gordo is watching her but there is no proof and also the Callums question when the couple came home that Gordo's home is not really his home. Robyn learns that the couple knew Gordo real well and the police had to just question him. Sometimes, certain things can bother you and creep you or wouldn't they?

They are having an uncomfortable dinner. 

This is the surprise of the summer and maybe the year because on paper, this seemed to be a thriller that everybody would turn down. I would have maybe rejected it but the movie challenges you with every subversive expectation that a certain protagonist and a certain antagonist are processing and what they are doing to each other. It is a quiet, enigmatic thriller that is more clever with its editing, camerawork and cinematography. It is the type of move that Alfred Hitchcock can certainly approve and Joel Edgerton, astutely crafts his own style with ease and subtely with some raging arguments in-between in a moody atmosphere.

You will never look at Jason Bateman again as he does not use the same mannerisms and behavior in his comedies or action comedies. He creates a genteel character that backs away like the camerawork and even though he looks like the successful and disciplined character, you anticipate that he has a hidden agenda. Rebecca Hall, finally, in a good movie with a very good character with a backstory that she is depressed from a miscarriage and wants to have the best life possible as she wants to get pregnant again. She is not just a typical wife in this movie. Joel Edgerton embodies a vulnerable and lost character that we, the audience, are suspicious of but feel sorry for due to his troubling past.

The pay-off to both Bateman's and Edgerton's characters is quite terrible in a good way because we feel emotionally involved in both characters as the suspense builds up into its chilling third act. It's not a throwaway like Fatal Attraction or Unlawful Entry, both similar type of chilling thrillers that this movie is also similar to. A portion of ambiguity in this movie can cause you to think as how all the characters will feel if it is better for themselves or not. I don't know. It is a sharply paced, tightly-scripted thriller that teaches a lesson to people that sometimes a hidden past can hurt people with such clean reputations that it might sneak up on them one day. It has three strong performances to turn this seemly predictable premise into a small gem of the summer.

***1/2