Checked out The Gift – the new “beware your neighbor/girlfriend/girl next door/boy next door/single white female/local cop” movie. This time it’s about a couple who move back to their hometown and the husband runs into an old friend from high school who becomes a little too fixated on the happy couple.

So you think you’ve seen this movie before but it’s really kind of unique for its genre. Partially because it’s a mystery as to what level of genre pick this is… does a rabbit get boiled, does someone change their hair color to match, etc. Or is it a sly, more subtle movie? Hint: it’s a sly more subtle movie… with a pretty good and smart script. Where the movie ultimately goes is more interesting than expected for this kind of film. It has something to say about how we treat other people and subverts our expectations of this sub-genre.

Now, it’s not a perfect film. It’s a little too slow for its own rights and its desire not to be a hysterical campy psycho neighbor movie kind of drag it down. Not that I needed it to be a campy psycho film, but its more sedate pace did start to grate as time passed – I was really into its more intelligent take… until it went on for an extra 20 minutes longer than it should have. My point is, don’t watch it with the hopes of a good audience-rousing creepy fun.

But it is an interesting film with a pretty cool and certainly disturbing question mark of an ending.

Score: 77