The Gift

There are some great performances, and some meaningful issues brought up, but damned is it slow going for the first third of the film. It's also always a precarious act when presenting "supernatural" nonsense as real, when you are also trying to take on serious issues instead of just having a bit of fun. And while this film doesn't really bring the mechanics of the plot's morality into conflict with having to play make believe in order to support our protagonist, and believe her (in the film, very real) clairvoyance, the doldrums of ignorance and magical thinking are, (other than, obviously, poverty, which is much of the cause of the former) a large part of what afflicts the types of people who populate the film, as well as holding back the rest of society. And conflating and confusing that with empathy and human kindness and moral and emotional support is always going to be a side effect of having people doing magic in films where the magic is not a metaphor for something else. In the end, though, the pacing is what makes this hard to get through.