The Gift (2000)

On the other side of the coin, you have Sam Raimi’s The Gift, a harrowing slice of small-town Southern life, barely hanging together on the strength of Cate Blanchett’s Annie Wilson, a psychic medium whose visions land her right in the middle of her tiny town’s worst drama. Some of the best supernatural stories involve putting one occult element in the middle of stark reality, and treating it seriously, much like one of the major threads in South of Midnight involves Bunny Flood looking for supernatural solutions to her unending grief. Not only is The Gift a prime example of that—a genuine hidden gem in Sam Raimi’s filmography—but also, even with an absurdly stacked cast, there is one major jaw-dropper of a performance: Keanu Reeves bringing his A-game playing a complete monster of an abusive redneck husband to Hilary Swank. He’s utterly–and believably–terrifying in the role, and probably for obvious reasons, he’s never played anything like it since.