Skip to footer

'The Gift': Why the suspenseful movie is impressing critics

Spooky movies aren't always well-received by critics, but reviewers are calling the new movie starring Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall, and Joel Edgerton 'masterful' and 'Hitchcockian.' Here's how the movie echoes the current success of horror on TV.

|
Matt Kennedy/STX Productions, LLC/AP
'The Gift' stars Rebecca Hall (l.) and Jason Bateman (r.).

The horror film “The Gift,” which stars Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall and is directed by another of its stars, Joel Edgerton, is impressing critics.

“Gift” tells the story of married couple Simon (Bateman) and Robyn (Hall), who encounter an unsettling high school acquaintance of Simon’s named Gordo (Edgerton). The movie is Edgerton’s feature-length debut and is also written by the actor, who has previously appeared in such films as “The Great Gatsby” and “Exodus: Gods and Kings." 

Many reviewers have been impressed with the film, with critics calling it “a Hitchcockian exercise in deception,” “masterful,” and “tremendously sly… may be the most unnerving in any mainstream American thriller since ‘Seven.’" 

Some moviegoers may be surprised to see the superlative reviews for “The Gift.” Often many horror movies are viewed as akin to coming off an assembly line creatively and aren’t usually well-reviewed. For example, many of the 2014 highest-grossing horror movies such as “Annabelle,” “The Purge: Anarchy,” “Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones,” and “Ouija” nor the 2015 movie “Unfriended” did well with critics.

However, horror TV shows are currently scoring critically and with viewers on TV. The FX show “American Horror Story,” which switches to a different spooky setting every season, has become a hit for the network, and the NBC show “Hannibal” was well-received by critics before it was recently canceled. The FX show “The Strain” and Showtime’s “Penny Dreadful” have also been mostly well-reviewed.

Meanwhile, some critically well-received thrillers have come to movie theaters recently, like last year’s “Gone Girl,” which was based on Gillian Flynn’s massive bestseller and earned “Girl” actress Rosamund Pike an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. The 2014 movie “Nightcrawler” and 2013’s “The Conjuring” mostly scored with critics as well. If films like these keep appearing on the scene, the genre could experience a creative reawakening akin to what’s happening on the small screen.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to 'The Gift': Why the suspenseful movie is impressing critics
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Culture-Cafe/2015/0807/The-Gift-Why-the-suspenseful-movie-is-impressing-critics
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe