Director Sam Raimi (not to be confused with bass-baritone opera singer Sam Ramey) has been directing movies since 1985, including most recently the first three Spider-Man films (2002-2007), but has spent most of his time since 2013 as a producer. He is mostly known for his "horror" films, starting with The Evil Dead in 1981, but also made the excellent heist movie A Simple Plan in 1998. The Gift is a somewhat supernatural piece of Southern Gothic, with an excellent cast of Cate Blanchett, Katie Holmes, Keanu Reeves, Giovanni Rubisi, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, Gary Cole, J.K. Simmons.
Cate Blanchett plays a widow with three young children who manages to get by with fortune telling. Katie Holmes is murdered and the violent husband of Swank, Keanu Reeves, is convicted of the murder. Blanchett, however, has visions of someone else being the killer and, at some risk to herself, tracks down the murderer by going back to the scene of the murder, a gloomy pond surrounded by cypress trees.
The moody cinematography is by veteran Jamie Anderson and Raimi effectively captures the details of the denizens and details of a small Southern town, where sex and violence predominate and even jobs are unsafe, Cate Blanchett's husband having died in a factory explosion.
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