Review of The Gift (2015) by Lewis A — 04 Sep 2015

I've anticipated seeing this movie for a while now, but it certainly did not live up to expectations. (Spoilers ahead).

Overall, the reviews for The Gift are fairly positive, this surprised me. Let me start off with the story. We begin with the impression that Gordon is a strange, outcast-like presence for Simon and Robyn. Robyn sides with him for the most part of the movie, while Simon is in complete opposition. Here's where the problem comes in, I sided with Simon the entire time, at certain points, viewers were pushed to think that Simon was in the wrong. I found Robyn's argument weak for why she trusted Gordon, a man who recently showed up in her life multiple times bringing gifts and random visits. Now for the plot holes. Something that should have been discussed more was Simon's fear of monkeys. It is only said that a childhood experience is what has resulted in said phobia, we never found out how traumatic this experience was, only a simple "ugh Monkeys" upon seeing one in Gordon's "house". If Simon had a crippling fear of monkeys, why would he keep that toy for so long after his wife's miscarriage? In the final climax, Gordon is seen wearing a monkey mask and Simon is obviously disturbed, but something tells me that the mask wasn't the the scary thing. Videos of his wife passed out on the floor and the possibility of Gordon taking advantage of her kind of over-powers the monkey mask. In the end, I was left thinking about why they even included the monkey thing because it didn't affect the story much and was portrayed as a silly little fear. The slow camera movements were interesting and did cause me to feel anxious about what was going to happen next, but those were the only shots that stood out to me. I feel that the use of Bokeh was a little too much and the color-grading wasn't that spectacular. When I first saw the trailer, I got a Gone Girl vibe from the story and look of it, but now I can say that it's more of a basic horror movie plot (like Insidious or The Purge) disguised as a good film, this movie is trying to be respected, but really can only be seen as a great film by someone who doesn't care about details and just wants to be startled by jump-scares.