When the credits came up on Gerald’s Game and showed that it was based on a story by Stephen King, I went, “Oh, that makes sense.” The entire movie finally came together for me. The flashbacks to a broken childhood focusing on a specific trauma. The scenario of a protagonist facing a very personal horror coupled with visions that may be psychological. The favorite setting of being deep in woods and no one coming for your help. The inexplicable presence of what might be a supernatural entity that she calls “the man made of moonlight.” The obsession with Americana. The Green Mile-esque twist where a “supernatural” element follows our protagonist in the epilogue. The uncomfortable feeling you get because everything is just one shade of becoming inappropriate. If it were any other author, I might take them to task for it… but this is Stephen King. He gets a bit of a pass. If I was OK when he did it with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I’m going to be OK with it here.
Carla Gugino plays the poor wife of Bruce Greenwood, who is our titular Gerald. What is his game? Is it Monopoly, 21, checkers, or chess? Nothing so mundane. Like Christian Grey, he is man with certain kinks, and his game involves handcuffs. However, shortly after Gugino blurts out her safeword, Greenwood suffers a fatal heart attack. He spends only the opening scenes as flesh and blood and the rest of the movie as a ghost. He does, however, spend almost all of the movie shirtless and absolutely shredded. Seriously, the man makes me feel OK about getting old. Gugino is fine playing his kinky games until she gets handcuffed to the bed after which he dies of a heart attack. Also, the door is left open. Hungry feral animals are wander about. And there is no one near the cabin for miles. Even without the supernatural horror (which may all be in Gugino’s mind), it’s a frightening scenario.
There’s a risk though, of updating a story originally written in 1992: nowadays, we have cellphones. Rather than ignore that inconvenience, Gerald’s Game made it a plot element. Our entire viewing party was very vocal about Gugino’s cellphone dialing attempts and her foolishness of not having that phone fully charged.
Gugino pulls off a fantastic performance here, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen her in from any movie. (And all of it, incidentally, while lying handcuffed on a bed.) She fortunately doesn’t have to carry the entire movie by herself: ghost Bruce Greenwood represents her thoughts and fears as she tries to escape her nightmare scenario.
The movie is tense and suspenseful, and the gross out moment had half of us shutting our eyes and the other half screaming. If you thought that hammer swing from Misery was painful, you might want to steer clear of what Gugino goes through.
Out of all the movies made of Stephen King stories, Gerald’s Game may have come closest in term of tone. This may be my main criticism, by the way. It’s so close to King’s style that all of his most unsavory obsessions are laid bare. Read: there’s a reason no one does an accurate adaptation of It. And as a content warning, Gerald’s Game does broach the subject of child abuse with as much nuance as you can expect from a Stephen King story. The ending is also a deal-breaker for some (including our very own A Winged Potato), but as I mentioned in the opening that sort of narrative madness — where something magical was real but perhaps not the way you thought it would be — is pure King.
That said, you’re not thinking if the director is some auteur who has attached his own flourishes, or if the slower parts were augmented by big special effects tricks that weren’t in the book. Watching Gerald’s Game is like reading a novel as you’re bundled up in your favorite chair while a lightning storm rages outside. What’s that in the shadows? Is that the Moonlight Man?
Rating: 4/5 stars.