Review: ‘The Gift’ — Well Crafted But Predictable Psychic Thrills

By the time that he was directing The Gift in 2000 (or, more likely, in 1999), Sam Raimi had made a real name for himself as a modern auteur, as a filmmaker whose films became worth seeing solely on the basis of him being in the director’s chair. He had proven himself time and time again across an impressive variety of genres, with only one ‘dud’ to his name — 1999’s For Love of the Game — which nonetheless received a faint, lukewarm praise rather than any real disdain. It is as though even the warning of a failed film snapped Raimi straight back to his roots, however, as he snappily tossed aside any sense of real sentimentality to be found in the 1999 sports film and headed back towards the horror genre, where his career was kickstarted.

The Gift is not really what one would readily label as a horror film, certainly not in comparison to the kinds of horror which Raimi would master both before and after the release of this film at the turn of the century — the Evil Dead trilogy had managed to shift from being gory and eerie to a quite literal parody of itself complete with its lead character being thrown back to medieval times carrying nothing but his trusty shotgun…