Gerald's Game (2017)

Having enjoyed (for the most part) what I've seen of Mike Flanagan's movies (Oculus review coming soon), and having thought his work very Stephen King-like, I thought it only fair to check out his actual Stephen King adaptation, Gerald's Game (2017).

I must admit that I was hesitant: the story didn't sound exciting to me. I've heard many things, and those things unsettled me: it's a sex game gone wrong, it's an exploration of grief and assault trauma. It sounded like some heady shit that I didn't really want to venture into. Upon reading some reviews, however, it appears to be Flanagan's highest-reviewed work. It is also often cited as one of the best adaptations of King's work.

I'm a bonafide Stephen King enthusiast, and I couldn't turn down his best cinematic adaptation. So I strapped in, fired up Netflix, and allowed myself to be taken there.

Summary:

Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald Burlingame (Bruce Greenwood) head out on a getaway weekend to revitalize their struggling marriage. After a sex game goes terribly wrong, Jessie is forced to figure out the lengths she will go to survive.

Pros:

This is a Play: For the most part, this movie takes place in a single space. There are flashbacks and nightmare sequences, but the action largely focuses squarely in the bedroom, and mostly on the bed that Jessie is handcuffed to. It feels like a stage play, and I'm a little shocked that no one has adapted it to the stage, as I think it would work well, there.

Powerhouse Performance: Carla Gugino has had a quietly successful career. She is IN a lot of things, but rarely gets the spotlight. She is a talented actress, however, and I have been waiting for a breakout role to come her way. As Jessie, she proves that she is powerhouse performer who can carry the weight of a feature film on her shoulders (or her shackled forearms). Gugino gets to play Jessie over the course of being tied to a bed, and that slow descent into madness. She also gets to play a rational. survival driven part of her own subconscious mind that tries to help her figure a way out of this situation. Gugino deftly plays out Jessie's arc of strength-finding and trauma-confrontation with real pathos and heartbreaking commitment. Kudos, also, to Bruce Greenwood, who comes in clutch as Gerald: he strikes the perfect balance of a loved husband, and a sinister representation of Jessie's darker impulses. Gerald is not easy: his game is abusive, and quickly turns from fetish to frightening, but Greenwood's turn as Jessie's hallucination allows for both her view of him as someone she was afraid of but also loved deeply.

The Gang is Back Together: Co-scriptwriter Jeff Howard and cinematographer Machael Fimognari return, lending a consistent stylistic tone and feel to Gerald's Game. The camera is playful, finding interesting ways to play with Jessie's limited perception and fixed location. Flanagan and Howard's script captures the essence of Stephen King's prose, while ditching some of King's more fanciful, only-get-away-with-in-a-novel tendencies. Flanagan again plays with greens and reds, especially noticeable in the beach house flashback scenes during the eclipse. He crafts some really affecting, beautiful imagery.

Survival as Horror: There is no supernatural terror, here. The dread comes from a sense of impending doom. Jessie's own mind turns this into a kind of creeping figure of death, right down the hallway, coming for her. But the terror is all rooted in slowly starving to death in a remote location. And then there's Jessie's confrontation of her own trauma. She explores her marriage to Gerald, and how low-key abusive he was. But, in order to make sense of that, she has to trip back further. To an evening at the beach house with her family. She has to confront the shackles that Gerald put her in, literally. Then she has to confront the shackles her father put on her when she was twelve. I appreciated the way Flanagan handled this part of the story: he doesn't exploit it. He handles it with care and maturity, allowing the horror of it to play on the audience without undue manipulation. By the end of her ordeal, Jessie escapes a stronger woman. Her illusory self and husband subtly guide her through the motions of survival, and prod her to confront her own darkness. I am glad that Flanagan allows her out of her darkness, too. She writes a letter to her twelve-year-old self explaining why she did what she did, and it is a raw, affecting mea culpa that allows Jessie to proceed with the rest of her life, empowered.

Clever Survival Tactics: Jessie manages to create a straw out of the tag for her fancy lingerie to sip water from one of Gerald's many glasses of water (he gets thirsty when he takes his little blue pills). Jessie then shatters that glass, and slits her own wrist, in order to use her own blood as lubrication to get her out of the cuffs. Then she bandages her own forearm with two tampons, and takes off in the car. The movie gives Jessie everything she needs to survive, and allows her to find those things in organic ways. Also, the practical effect of her flesh peeling away as she tries to slip her hand out of the cuff is absolutely stomach-churning brilliance: Just as you think it can't possibly get worse, it does. So gross.

Cons:

Final Minute Fumble: This movie really should have ended with Jessie's montage of setting up the center for women using Gerald's insurance payout. But Flanagan decides to keep what I can only imagine is Stephen King's intended ending: actually, THERE WAS a creeping dude in the room with her. It wasn't "death," or some kind of psychological manifestation. Instead, Flanagan uses the last five minutes of the film to ham-handedly shoe-horn in a story of the "Crypt Creeper" (in a movie as clever as this, this name is a slap in the face for how insipid it is). The Crypt Creeper is a man beset by acromegaly, which lends him a monstrous appearance. See guys? She wasn't hallucinating at all. THERE REALLY WAS A MONSTER! Fuck off. The movie would have been incredibly powerful as a piece of psychological horror. Then they decided that the monster had to be real. And, instead of leaving clues and explanation throughout the film, they slap-dashed an explanation in THE LAST FIVE MINUTES OF THE MOVIE. Jesus. It really is a good movie, right up until this point. Maybe Flanagan suffers from the same problem that King does: can't seem to stick the landing, despite promising, proficient storytelling beforehand.

Trigger Warning: This film deals with sexual abuse, and the insidious way it changes a life forever. While I noted that it doesn't exploit, it also doesn't flinch. This may not be a movie for you.

Could Be Leaner: I think this film could have lost a good ten minutes. Especially that Crypt Creeper bullshit. Flanagan handles the pace well, but a movie about a woman trapped on a bed is bound (lol, see what I did?) to test an audience's patience. It isn't egregiously long at 103 minutes, but I think there is a leaner, more effective 90 minute cut that could have been made.

In Conclusion:

Thanks to a shattering performance from Carla Gugino, Gerald's Game is going to stay with me for some time. Flanagan is growing as a filmmaker, pushing past the boundaries of "just horror," in much the same way that Stephen King forced himself to with his later fiction. Unfortunately, he shares another trait with the legend of horror fiction: an inability to effectively nail the landing. Flanagan has, in that way, crafted one of the most pitch-perfect King adaptations to date. Warts included.

Should You Watch It?

It's a tough watch: I know some of my friends who would absolutely hate this movie because of its subject (sexual abuse). I would be very careful recommending it to just anybody. If you are a fan of King's work, or Flanagan's, consider this a must. otherwise, approach with caution.

Miscellany:

- The film includes references to many other King works: Delores Claiborne and The Dark Tower: Jessie dreams of a woman standing over a well during an eclipse is Claiborne, and Gerald's hallucinatory manifestation tells Jessie that "all things serve the beam." There are dialogue references to Cujo and Bag of Bones, too. In the Moonlight Man's bag, there is a rook's skull: this is a reference Cuthbert, from the Dark Tower series, who wore a rook's scull on a necklace. Going real deep with these references. I'm here for them.
- The book that Jessie throws at the dog is Midnight Mass, a novel written by Maddie Young, the deaf writer from Flanagan's home invasion thriller, Hush (2016). Suck it, Marvel: FLANAGAN SHARED UNIVERSE!
- The headboard is the lower portion of the Lasser Glass prop from Oculus (2013) turned on its head. I had to look that shit up: it's true. MORE FLANAGAN SHARED UNIVERSE!