The Gift(2015)

Shortly after Simon (Jason Bateman) severs his and Robyn’s (Rebecca Hall) ties with Gordo (Joel Edgerton), thinking him to be too strange, Robyn begins to think that Gordo is stalking her in her own house whenever she is there by herself when she starts to hear footsteps and strange noises at random times and once sees that the kitchen faucet had been turned on while she was in another room. Her increasing paranoia causes her to start losing sleep, and in an effort to ease her mind, she starts taking prescription pills that she steals from her neighbor, Lucy (Allison Tolman). Her and Simon’s dog, Mr. Bojangles, also mysteriously disappears one morning, but he returns several nights later alive and unharmed, and Simon suspects that Gordo took the dog in order to mess with their heads. Shortly after the dog’s return, Simon and Robyn get a letter in the mail from Gordo where he apologizes for misjudging the situation between them and for things turning out the way they did, and he adds that, while he would never do anything to upset either of them and wishes that he could start over, he will honor their wish for him to leave them both alone for good. However, in the letter’s post-postscript, he writes to Simon that “after all these years, (he) really was willing to let bygones be bygones.” A curious Robyn asks Simon what that means, but he replies that he doesn’t know, and he tells her that they should just forget about Gordo.

Robyn’s paranoia and pill use continues, and then one afternoon, she apparently becomes so overwhelmed by her paranoia that she faints on her bedroom floor while investigating the source of some unusual sounds in there. She wakes up in bed the next morning, and she walks into the kitchen to find Simon waiting for her. He brings up how he found her unconscious when he came home from work last night, then shows her the stolen pills he found and accuses her of relapsing (while they were living in Chicago, she had miscarried a baby and turned to drugs to deal with the pain of the loss, but she managed to get clean). Robyn gives Simon the phone and tells him that he needs to call Gordo because, since he made peace with them, they have to make peace with him. When he asks what that has to do with the pills, she explains that she feels scared whenever she is here alone and keeps expecting Gordo to show up at any time, and she feels that these fears have made her kind of crazy and were what caused her to faint yesterday. She then tells him that, if they say sorry to Gordo, they will make this right, and she will feel better. Simon replies that it is all over between them and him, based on when he told Gordo to leave them alone and what Gordo wrote in his letter, but she asks him what about the letter suggests that it is over. She again asks him what Gordo meant by “bygones be bygones” and tells him that she thinks that, if he still believes that Gordo took Mr. Bojangles, then Gordo is not really done with them. When she asks a now-irritated Simon if there is something that HE wants to tell her, he emphatically declares that this subject is closed, and then he insists that they just put Gordo behind them and get on with their lives.

Over the course of the next few months, Robyn quits taking pills and her health returns to normal, Gordo is not seen or heard from by her or Simon, and she becomes pregnant again. However, while out on a shopping trip with Lucy a few months into her pregnancy, Lucy shows her that Gordo is watching her from outside of the store that they are shopping in. She goes outside to find out what he wants, but he leaves quickly. Now overwhelmed with curiosity about Gordo and his true intentions and fearing that he ultimately seeks to hurt her and Simon over something that occurred in his and Simon’s shared past, Robyn decides to do some investigating into the matter without telling Simon about it, having accepted that Simon will never talk about this willingly with her. In the end, she finds out from a few sources (chiefly a background check that Simon secretly ran on Gordo that she ends up finding in his desk in his home office, as well as meeting and speaking with his old high school friend, Greg [David Denman]) that the reason why Gordo has been disrupting her and Simon’s life stems from an incident from his and Simon’s high school days: Back then, Simon reported to someone at their school that Gordo was being molested by an older male student, and this story spread all over the school and caused everyone to believe that Gordo was homosexual. However, it turns out that Simon had made the whole thing up (with Greg knowing about it); he was a bully with a real mean streak, and Gordo was a frequent target of his because he was considered one of the “weak kids.” He also told that lie for no reason other than “because he could,” and he never admitted to anyone that the story wasn’t true. The falsehood basically ruined Gordo’s life; he became a frequent target for bullying and beatings, and then one day, his father – thinking that Gordo truly was gay – tried to burn him alive. He failed and was arrested for attempted murder, and Gordo ended up getting shipped off to military school after that. In addition to discovering all of this, Robyn also finds out that Simon ran a background check on a Danny McDonald (P.J. Byrne), a man he is competing with for a promotion at work.

One night, Robyn confronts Simon about his past with Gordo and how he told a lie that nearly led to Gordo getting killed. Though he admits that he treated Gordo badly in school, Simon refuses to take any responsibility for anything that happened as a result of his lie and declares that he doesn’t owe Gordo anything, citing how he was able to move on from his own father’s abusive treatment of him and make something of himself. Robyn tells him that he ought to at least apologize to Gordo for his part in ruining his life, but Simon shoots down that idea, and when he tells her that he thinks that she just wants him to do this because she was bullied herself in high school, she slaps him in the face and tells him that he is clearly just as much of a bully now as he was then. She then yells that he should at least try to fix this for their own sakes, and when Simon replies that he doesn’t know where to find Gordo, Robyn exposes that as a lie when she pulls out his file on Gordo and slams it down next to him. Later on, Simon talks to Robyn and tells her that he had that background check done on Gordo in an effort to protect her and didn’t tell her about it because he wanted this problem to be his burden alone, and he also claims that he didn’t know to what extent that Gordo’s father had hurt him. However, Robyn replies that she doesn’t believe him, and she also tells him that she now realizes that she doesn’t know who he really is anymore.

Simon ends up agreeing to apologize to Gordo (off-screen), so he tracks Gordo down to a bar he is hosting a trivia contest at. After it concludes, he approaches Gordo while he is packing some stuff into his car, and he proceeds to give him a half-hearted apology. However, Gordo quickly realizes that his apology is not sincere and tells Simon that it is too late for that, and he also tells Simon that, while he may be done with the past, the past is not done with him. Simon responds to this by first roughing him up a little and telling him that who he is is his own fault, then warning him that, if he ever comes near him or his family again, he will destroy him. Simon then returns home, and he tells Robyn that Gordo had accepted his apology.

Some days later, Simon gets the promotion after Danny McDonald is fired over some incriminating information that surfaced about him. One night, while Simon and Robyn are holding a party with their friends and Simon’s co-workers at their house to celebrate this, the party gets interrupted by a couple of strange sounds, and then someone outside the house smashes one of the front windows by throwing a rock through it. Simon picks up a baseball bat and goes outside to investigate, and Robyn asks one of the partygoers to call the police. Suddenly, a man emerges from out of nowhere and shoves Simon down before making a break for the street, but Simon manages to catch up to him and tackle him to the ground. He then finds out that the trespasser is Danny, and Danny furiously yells to him in front of everyone that he knows that he fabricated the information about him that cost him both the promotion and his job. When police sirens are heard approaching in the distance, Danny begs to be let go because he doesn’t want to be arrested, so Simon decides to let him leave. Robyn then suddenly goes into labor, and she is taken to the hospital and gives birth to a son.

While Simon is getting a look at his son from the viewing window of the hospital’s nursery, he gets a call from Kevin (Tim Griffin), one of his co-workers who attended the party, who informs him that their bosses have decided to fire him because they looked into the information that he sent them about Danny and discovered that he really did fabricate all of it. When Simon visits Robyn in her room afterwards, she tells him that she (and their baby) will not be coming home with him, implying that she wants to end their marriage because she has had enough of all the drama and negativity that he has brought upon them and others. After promising to return later so they can talk more about this, Simon goes back home to take care of some things. However, as he approaches his front doorstep, he spots a big wrapped gift sitting there (obviously from Gordo) with a card attached that features a picture of a monkey on it (which Gordo undoubtedly chose to mock Simon with because Simon is terrified of monkeys). He opens the gift to find a baby bassinet inside, along with three smaller wrapped boxes marked 1, 2, and 3 inside of that. Simon opens up box #1 and sees that it contains a key to his front door; Gordo was able to get a hold of one of the house keys during one of his past visits to the house and get a copy of it made, and this confirms that Gordo had indeed been secretly stalking Robyn whenever she was alone there. He then opens box #2, which contains a blank CD bearing the words “Play Me,” and he plays it to discover that Gordo had recorded him making fun of him in front of Robyn back during a dinner party they had months ago after Gordo temporarily left the house he was hosting it in (which turned out to not be his house) to take a call. He then opens the last box to find that it contains a blank DVD with “Watch Me” written on it, and when he plays it, it shows a series of clips of him and Robyn that Gordo recorded at various times from outside their house, and it ends on the moment when Robyn fainted. The DVD then airs its final piece of disturbing footage: Just after Robyn had fallen unconscious, Gordo recorded himself walking through the house disguised in a monkey mask, and he also recorded himself carrying around the mostly-empty bottle of Gatorade that Robyn had been drinking from just before she fainted, clearly indicating that he drugged the Gatorade during one of his earlier secret intrusions. A tearful Simon then watches as Gordo picks up Robyn, puts her down on her bed, and then looks over at a nearby mirror and waves at it before directing the camera’s lens down onto the bed. The footage then cuts out, leaving it unknown if Gordo had raped and possibly impregnated Robyn. Meanwhile, Gordo pays a surprise visit to Robyn in the hospital and gives her flowers to congratulate her, but the area around the outer edge of his left eye and eyebrow is cut and bruised and his right arm is in a sling. Robyn asks him if Simon caused those injuries, and he answers that Simon is indeed responsible for them. He soon tells her that he is very happy for her and that good people deserve good things.

Simon immediately drives back to the hospital, and he tries to call Robyn on the way there, but she doesn’t answer her phone. After he gets there, he heads straight for her room, but he finds that she is not in it. When he walks back out into the hall, he spots Gordo waiting to get into a nearby elevator, but he is unable to reach him before he goes into it and the doors close on him. Simon then attempts to pursue Gordo, but he soon loses track of him and ends up outside the hospital. Gordo then calls Simon from inside the hospital, where he first taunts him before telling him that he knows that he wants him to say that he didn’t really rape Robyn and get her pregnant. However, he doesn’t know if he should do that for him, considering how he never confessed to anyone that he wasn’t really molested. In the end, Gordo refuses to confirm or deny that he raped and impregnated Robyn, and he tells Simon that he just needs to go and have a look at the baby to determine if it truly is his before stating “it’s all in the eyes.” He then closes the phone call by saying, “You see what happens when you poison other people’s minds with ideas?”

Simon goes back to the nursery’s viewing window and sees Robyn in there cradling their son. He tries to get a good look at his son, but he can’t, and after Robyn notices that he is out there, she looks at him with displeasure before a nurse draws the curtains on the windows. Accepting that his marriage and career are now ruined, Simon sinks to the floor and starts crying. Gordo is then shown watching Simon’s breakdown through the window of a door down the hall, and knowing that he has gotten his revenge, he walks on out of the hospital, removing his arm sling as he goes.