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Rating: Joel Edgerton steps in front and behind the camera for the first time and crafts the drama/thriller The Gift, which arrived in Italy a few months ago and was distributed by Koch Media, an increasingly important entity in our film market.
The screenplay by Edgerton himself tells the story of a couple, Rebecca Hall and Jason Bateman, who move from Chicago to the terraced houses on the hills of Los Angeles. Here they encounter "Gordo" (Edgerton himself), an old friend of Simon (Jason Bateman), who starts delivering gifts to the couple, demonstrating a certain obsessiveness towards them.
Edgerton takes a chance directing as well, a complicated choice in this precise cinematic moment, where only a narrow circle of "big" blockbuster titles with flying bats and all-smashing heroes manage to break through in the market. He cares little about this and produces, writes, acts, and directs a thriller rooted in the classic Hitchcockian suspense. Edgerton doesn’t need to rely on blood, stabbings, and various dismemberments. He creates, constructs, and fuels tension, combining the timing of classic cinema with the visual devices of contemporary cinema: image research, construction of "frames," photography that emphasizes atmosphere, a plot that zigzags between its ambiguous characters who clearly do not reveal everything they know. And this is one of the questions the film poses to those who watch it: what do we really know about the person next to us? What lies behind the "mask" of those we love? The film stays grounded precisely because it needs to pose this question about halfway through its duration, when an event from the past resurfaces, widening the ambiguities of the plot and the characters that move it. The triangle on which Edgerton’s work is built is designed not to give points of reference and where it becomes clear that the only real prey is Robyn, played by a Rebecca Hall skilled at shaping a woman who shows in the solitude of the new life her long-carried vulnerabilities. An actress who deserves more attention than she has received so far.
The architecture of the screenplay leaves room for imagination and, playing on the unspoken, fuels the thrilling atmosphere the film thrives on. In this, Edgerton is adept at maintaining a measured direction and crafting an interior-focused work with a dilated rhythm. The indeterminacy, at times exaggerated, comes out when the film becomes static and begins to gradually fade, leading to the need to change some cards on the table, turning Robyn into a sort of amateur detective. Because while it’s true that the entire atmosphere is built with meticulous rigor and "dryness," it is also clear how The Gift never quite finds the strength to take off and break the molds on which it’s constructed. The finale attempts to break everything and overturns some half-truths, giving final vitality to a title that was alarmingly spiraling into its inability to go beyond the classic tropes of the genre.
6/10
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