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The Gift is a horror story for those of us of a certain age who are old enough to have buried those embarrassing and traumatic missteps of high school, but not too old to have forgotten them completely.

Remember those offhand or insensitive comments you lobbed at easy targets? Those things you regretted saying but didn't have the guts to apologize for? Or maybe you are an upstanding citizen now but were an outright bully back in the day.

Beware then, people like Gordo.

Robyn and Simon (Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman) move into a swank new home hoping for a new start. Maybe this time Robyn will get her anxiety under control and Simon will get that big promotion at work, and perhaps the twosome can finally start a family.

After the move, the couple bumps into Gordon Moseley, "Gordo" (Joel Edgerton), an acquaintance of Simon's from high school. Gordo's first gift is an expensive bottle of wine, and frequent drop-in visits to the couple's home — particularly when Robyn is alone — follow. 

“I believe the bad things in life, they can be a gift," says Gordo, directly to Simon.

Gordo is awkward but inoffensive: Robyn doesn't want to hurt his feelings. Simon wants nothing to do with him. But Gordo is one of those persistent, omnipresent people who can't take a hint. "You're being forced into a break-up," counsels one of the couple's more socially acceptable friends. 

After a particularly strange dinner invitation, Simon has had enough. "After all these years I was willing to let bygones be bygones," Gordo counters. The menace starts, as these things invariably do, with animal endangerment. But Robyn may be even more vulnerable than the dog or the fish in their koi pond. 

Things are always more terrifying when the place most often invaded is our own home. Kudos to filmmakers, notably director of photography Eduard Grau, for maintaining that feeling of low-grade dread through Robyn's daylight hours: it's significant, since over time she realizes that the real danger may lie much closer to home. 

Nonetheless Robyn ignores the warning signals in all the silly ways women do: "It's probably all in my head," "I'm sure it's nothing." While Simon, an artful liar, avoids her questions about those "bygones" to which Gordo refers.

This is a one-man show from Edgerton, who not only wrote and directed for the first time, but also produces and stars as the fantastically creepy "Gordo the Weirdo." One step to the left or right from any of the three leads and the whole thing would have collapsed as too silly or far-fetched. But Hall is just the right dose of fragile; Bateman a completely realistic bully, both at home and in the corporate playground. (Bateman has been building up to playing the bad guy, most recently aiming f-bombs at kids in Bad Words, but here he lets his inner villain loose.) 

"You think you're done with the past but the past is not done with you." Try to avoid the trailer, which gives too much away. And above all, whether you were mean to someone back in high school or told a lie to get promoted, make the apologies to the Gordos in your life and then go see The Gift. 

The Gift plays at Scotiabank.