Gerald’s Game

Stephen King hasn’t always had the best film adaptations, but it’s always reassuring when you come across not only a film that seems to capture his spirit and tone of voice on the screen, but also a director who can specifically do that, and Mike Flanagan seems to be that director. Originally starting off creating low-budget horror films like Absentia, Oculus and Hush, which were not ground breakers but were received well, before sparking up in popularity after resurrecting the dead corpse of the 2016 horror film, Ouija, with an actually impressive sequel, and became a cult name after his 2018 smash hit mini-series on Netflix, The Haunting of Hill House. All these projects highlighted his capabilities for portraying horror, and it was the 2017 Netflix film, Gerald’s Game, that showed his capabilities for King’s work as well, which has arguably influenced his involvement with future King projects like The Life of Chuck and even a TV show on The Dark Tower. After this performance, it feels like those properties are in safe hands. Jessie Burlingame (played by Carla Gugino) travels with her husband, Gerald (played by Bruce Greenwood) to an isolated lake house cabin for a romantic getaway with plans of rekindling their failing marriage. With plans to spice things up using handcuffs, things get unpleasant quickly once Gerald starts to become a little too into this fantasy and comes close to actually raping her. To make matters worse, he suffers a fatal heart attack and dies on the spot, leaving Carla locked to the bed with no way of contacting the outside world. With a stray ravenous dog entering the home to feast on her husband’s corpse (with her being next if nothing is done), Jessie starts to spiral and has vivid hallucinations of Gerald, who continues to demean her, as well as a more capable version of herself, who acts as a supporting push for her to find a way out. With days passing with no help, and with the supposed figure of death (played by Carel Struycken) looming over her waiting to claim her very soul, this isolated incident will force Carla to dig up past traumatic memories with her father (played by Henry Thomas), make her confront the fears that have shaped her life to this moment, and push her to the breaking point mentally and physical to get her to escape this situation and not leave her as a casualty of a failed sex-capade. Although not one of Flanagan’s more well-known movies, its positive reception (even from Stephen King himself) put a feather in his directing cap, with this adaption of King’s 1992 novel easily being one of his finest outings. With great tension-building and pacing, fantastic acting, minute but effective visuals and a tone that perfectly balances the intense and the silly, this is one of the best Stephen King adaptations bar none.

Gerald’s Game already starts off strong with a fantastic premise to build a suspenseful survival tale out of. A similar situation to something like Misery but made unique enough to not feel like a recycling of old ideas, the concept of a person being left trapped to a bed after a sex act gone wrong has all the workings of a great Stephen King story, diving into the psychology of this character in a way that is introspective and tragic in a fashion that only an author like him could provide. It’s a story that is insanely gripping, ties together themes of hopelessness, staying submissive and quiet due to trauma, and overcoming it through mindfulness, in a way that is both realistic and abstract at the same time, and although containing some of his usual King-ism that muddle certain sections (like a bit of a messy ending), it doesn’t take away from the experience that it offers. Despite what it might look like, there is actually enough solid content in this story to adapt into a film, and the way in which Flanagan captures and displays this story from the book to the screen is close to as perfect and seamless a translation can be. After an opening that is a little wonky with odd acting and some noticeable music choices, the film immediately kicks into high gear once the situation plays out, with a tone that is slightly maniacal and unhinge, yet is still able to capture the soft mental complexity of this story and manages to deliver a plot that is so small scale, yet equally gripping and emotionally effective. You feel this woman’s desire for freedom, you get nervous at worrying if she will mess up something which will doom her, you wince when you learn the truth behind her childhood and feel so relived once she manages to find a solution to the problem. While it does truncate elements from the book and make it a little more streamlined, the screenplay for this film written by Flanagan and Jeff Howard keeps King’s lyrical form of writing, which might sound unnatural but is so perfectly worded that you love the way every word is phrased. It has a great pace, it never gets dull or uninteresting despite the literal fixed location, the manner in which the themes tie into the given situation are very well executed, even some of the ties to King’s other stories don’t feel as distracting as other examples have in the past and doesn’t upend the more grounded nature of this situation with some supernatural craziness. The only thing that does feel a little awkward is the ending, which many people already had an issue within the book yet strangely found more complaints in this alternate. While it does get a little lost and can feel a little hoaky, it feels like it earns that sappiness, and the strange power of the closing image makes it all the more effective in spite of its obvious faults.

For a story like this to work, the lead needs to be engaging otherwise it will instantly fall apart. Thankfully, due to King’s strength at writing his main characters, Jessie manages to be incredibly well handled and does a great job at making you sympathize with her situation as well as her past dealings, as well as showing how she overcomes them. Her mental grief and past experiences shaping her into a person who’s willing to play as a submissive doll for any older male figure is a tragic life, and the way she compartmentalizes this and overcomes it through a literal self-reflection is very enthralling material. From verbal deconstruction to overt but still powerful visual metaphors, there is a lot of meat to chew on with this character and this film takes every opportunity to explore her. This is managed even better thanks to a truly fantastic portrayal by Carla Gugino, who would later become a favorite of Flanagan’s and appear in several more of his projects later down the line (usually being as equally good there as well), and it’s not hard to see why. Her nature never comes across as truly normal, but that makes her all the more intriguing and captivating, like she’s always had a little bit of a disturbed quality to her that’s coming to the surface now that she is facing almost certain death. Gugino makes this role believable in the panic, relates the struggle through very little words and with active grunts alone, the back and forth she has with other voices in her head (including herself) all feel insanely believable and never once a fabrication, and she carries this film on her shoulders very effectively as you never get bored watching her. The supporting cast is also pretty decent, as despite being quite small and not really being allowed to stand as their own people (most of them are quite literally mental fabrication), they add a nice spice to what would’ve otherwise been a one-woman show. Bruce Greenwood as the husband is fairly generic and even a little bland, but he starts to have a lot of fun the second he becomes the mental devil of her shoulder after he dies, bringing a slimy and pessimistic, yet still captivating portrayal that you enjoy watching (made even better against Gugino’s ‘’angel’’ version, which provides a nice reassuring offset). Chaira Aurelia is pretty good as a young version of the lead, Carel Struycken has a demeanor and look so eerie and otherworldly that he manages to be one of the creepiest looking things in any Stephen King property by sheer accident, and Henry Thomas is effectively disgusting as her abusive father (going from E.T to this is definitely a jump in terms of tonality).

For a movie that has little to show off and clearly has a small budget, the technical aspects of this film should be applauded for how they are able to convey so much with so little. Even something like Misery had the benefit of focusing on other people outside of the cabin and allowed its lead to move around the house throughout the movie, whereas this film requires complete focus on one room and one person for most of the entire film, making the audience feel just as isolated and uncertain as the main character is. In spite of this, it doesn’t suffer from this decision. It’s not a story that requires a large budget and the manner in which the film is handled from a visual and music level, is exactly what a story like this requires as the strengths of the story come through the emotional conflicts and the survival tactics being put on display in order to last this experience. In the beginning, the music choices seem a little too noticeably prominent and not needed in this kind of small-scale story, but as it continues, there is scarcely any music in this movie at all, allowing the tension of the scene to be very apparent and resulting in scenes that you could cut like a knife just from the anticipation of something happening (whether supernatural or otherwise). The cinematography by Michael Fimognari does a great job at capturing the claustrophobic feel of this premise, and gets a lot of great first-person shots and angles that really conveys this feeling of being stuck in a singular location, whether it’s viewing someone or something glaring at you from the foot of the bed, or gazing at the victim in a haplessly sprawled out fashion that highlights both how helpless but also how exposed she is in every sense of the world. Its tight, it doesn’t have a lot of motion and there’s not a lot of fancy angles or diverse positions of framing, yet all of them feel like they serve a purpose and deliver as such.

Gerald’s Game may not be on the level of something like The Shining, Carrie, or The Shawshank Redemption in terms of public awareness, but it definitely deserves to be as it is one of the best ones out there. Flanagan isn’t always a surefire success whenever he directs (even when it comes to Stephen King content as Doctor Sleep clearly showed), but he has proven time and time again that he has a unique manner of portraying horror in a subdued yet still chilling manner, and he seems to understand that the key to portraying the work of someone like King is to offer something that is suspenseful and gripping, but also slightly hammy and not supposed to be taken too seriously. He embraces the oddness that comes with a lot of King’s work and uses it as a means of providing contrast or personality rather than a stepping stone that can’t be entirely bridged, and the results have been mostly insanely enjoyable and memorable. With great direction, a solid script, smart visuals and a really strong leading performance, Gerald’s Game offers tense thrills and creepiness without ever needing a single jump scare, a definite must-see.