The Giver

The Giver (2014) is a science-fiction drama from director Phillip Noyce, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It imagines a future that has traded away war, pain and color for a calm, gray sameness, where every life is planned down to the smallest decision.

A teenager named Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) is singled out by the Council for an unusual job: Receiver of Memory. An old man known only as the Giver, played by Jeff Bridges, hands down everything the community chose to forget. Bit by bit Jonas feels sunlight, snow, music and love return to him, along with grief and fear nobody else carries. The more he remembers, the harder it gets to keep quiet. Meryl Streep plays the Chief Elder who guards the rules, with Alexander Skarsgard, Katie Holmes and Taylor Swift rounding out the cast.

The film draws on Lois Lowry's 1993 novel, a fixture of school reading lists for decades. Its black-and-white frames slowly bleed into color, a trick built right into the storytelling so we see the world wake up exactly as Jonas does. Stream The Giver (2014) online on iFILM.