“The Films Are Very Domestic”
The Gift is the third feature script by Edgerton to reach the screen, after The Square, a noir thriller from 2008 (co-written with Matthew Dabner, and directed by Edgerton’s brother Nash, an exciting filmmaker in his own right), and Felony, a police drama from 2013 (directed by Matthew Saville). Taken together, the three films reveal Edgerton to be skilled writer with a gift for steel-trap plotting and a stern moral sense.
They’re almost a variation on the same theme, using genre flourishes to tell twisty morality tales about seemingly decent suburban husbands whose lives fall apart after they makes some ethically dubious choices. Looking back, Edgerton says the three films are about the “struggle on a daily basis between being a good person or a bad person, and how it can change just by one action.”