Gerald's Game (2017)
Mike Flanagan is both one of the most beloved filmmakers working in the horror genre today and the most prolific modern adapter of Stephen King's novels. In terms of the former qualification, he is also the most frustratingly uneven. Here is a man who made Oculus, a marginally above-average haunted-mirror haunter that ultimately cribbed too liberally from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Then three years later, he put a thrillingly cerebral and disability-empowering spin on the home-invasion subgenre with Hush. That same year, he produced a vastly superior prequel to the atrocious Ouija which nonetheless fell short of being genuinely good. With Gerald's Game, his first Stephen King adaptation, co-written by Jeff Howard, based on the 1992 novel of the same name, Flanagan has concocted his psychological horror masterpiece.
Harrowing, heart-wrenching, contemplative, and ultimately inspiring, Flanagan uses the claustrophobically terrifying, high-concept premise and confined setting of King's story to explore the real-world (and ever-timely) theme of abuse and examine the inner life of one woman at the center of it, turning her unimaginably grim predicament into a metaphor for a life shackled by the oppressive grip of male toxicity.
Jessie and Gerald Burlingame (Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood) are a married couple taking a romantic getaway at an idyllic lake house in Fairhope, Alabama. In an attempt to reignite the spark in their rapidly deteriorating marriage, Gerald insists that they play a kinky game to spice up their sex life: he's brought along a pair of handcuffs, with the intent to shackle Jessie's wrists to the bedposts and enact a rape fantasy. Desperate to please her husband, Jessie initially, albeit uncomfortably, complies and allows herself to be handcuffed and objectified. As Gerald's behavior crosses the line into outright sadism, Jessie suffers a panic attack and objects to the game, insisting that this won't repair the deep-seated fissures in their relationship.
Due to a cocktail of Viagra and stress, Gerald suddenly suffers a most inopportune heart attack and drops dead on the floor, leaving an astonished and petrified Jessie handcuffed to the bedposts with nobody nearby to hear her screams for help. Her only company is a stray dog to whom she made the well-intentioned mistake of feeding raw Kobe steak earlier, leaving the front door open. As hours go by and the comfort of sunlight subsides into the menace of darkness, fatigue, dehydration, and a lack of blood circulation quickly take their toll on Jessie. To help her cope with her mounting anxiety and isolation, Jessie's brain produces a psychological escape of sorts: a hallucination of her deceased husband and a physically free double of herself materialize before her eyes, talking her through her ordeal, giving her pointers on how to survive, and, most crucially of all, forcing her to finally confront a series of unpalatable truths about her marriage, all of which stem from a history of suppressed sexual abuse at the hands of her manipulative, perverted father (Henry Thomas).
As if things couldn't get much worse, Jessie is visited in the night by a seemingly supernatural figure who Gerald refers to as "The Moonlight Man" (Carel Struycken), a deformed, gargantuan manifestation of Death itself who hides in the shadows, waiting to claim his next victim. With her body restrained to a bed, growing weaker by the minute, Jessie must summon every ounce of the strength, bravery, and intelligence she never knew she had in order to unshackle herself, both physically and mentally.
Gerald's Game shares narrative and protagonist similarities with two other horror films: Rob Reiner's Misery, a previous psychological horror King adaptation, and Flanagan's own home-invasion slasher, Hush. Like Paul Sheldon in the former title, Jessie spends the majority of her ordeal confined to a bed, necessitating her to rely solely on her wits and the objects at her disposal to aid in her potential survival. Like Maddie Young, Flanagan's protagonist from the latter film, Jessie's brain manifests a superior hallucination of herself to provide words of encouragement and help her strategize for escape. For the deaf and mute Maddie, the superior version of herself had the power of speech. For Jessie, her double is both physically unrestrained and emotionally assured. In a gesture of brilliantly self-aware casting, Flanagan has fittingly cast his wife and muse, Kate Siegel, the portrayer of Maddie, as Jessie's mother. Not only do both actresses bear a physical resemblance to one another, but both have embodied Flanagan protagonists who are physically vulnerable yet mentally agile and self-sufficient.
The plot begins as a simple and patiently paced exploration of a clearly toxic marriage on the verge of divorce, with Flanagan slowly teasing out the dynamic of his protagonists. During the drive to the lake house, Gerald places his free hand on Jessie's exposed leg and slides it up her skirt. In response, Jessie grabs his hand, gently pushes it out, and entangles her fingers with his, preferring the more innocent gesture of holding hands. Once the couple settles into the bedroom and the handcuffs emerge from the suitcase, Flanagan kicks the plot into high gear through Gerald's insidious rape fantasy that lays bare his truly sadistic color. Flanagan engineers an atmosphere that emphasizes isolation and claustrophobia through Jessie's complete loss of bodily autonomy, subverting the assumed simplicity and stagnation imposed by King's high concept by exploiting it as a jumping-off point to a window into Jessie's psychological makeup.
As harrowing and hopeless as Jessie's situation appears on its face, Flanagan and Howard manage to weave a sprinkle of gallows humor via Jessie's internal dialogue which forces her to confront a suppressed past, shame, and motivations, transforming Gerald's handcuffs into a psychological metaphor for her lifelong enslavement by toxic male relationships. Furthermore, the co-writer-director-editor utilizes deceptively mundane objects (a glass of water which Gerald used to down his fatal Viagra and the tag of Jessie's freshly purchased slip, both of which are strategically placed on the shelf above the bed) as plot vouchers to assist Jessie in her quest for survival, illustrating his heroine's untapped resourcefulness and fully developed sense of self-preservation.
However, Flanagan and Howard's most mind-blowing trick, likely adopted from King, is the way in which they introduce a supposedly supernatural dimension that reinforces our universal fears of the darkness and death before pulling the rug out from beneath our feet to reveal its groundedness in reality. Sporting a grotesquely enlarged head, deathlike pallor, sunken eyes, rotted teeth, and elongated arms and hands, the Moonlight Man appears as an abstract manifestation of Death itself: silent, towering, submerged in the shadows of the night, his face only glimpsed in the flickers of moonlight, and armed with a box of bones and trinkets. Most terrifying and scintillating of all is the fact that this monster is every bit as flesh and blood as the handcuffed woman he's terrorizing, Flanagan and Howard fleshing out King's ghastly creation with a fully developed backstory, medical diagnosis, and name.
Standing silently in the shadowy corner across from Jessie's bed, he may be the Moonlight Man, but in actuality, his name is Raymond Andrew Joubert, a deformed human being who suffers from acromegaly. The product of inbreeding from a pair of siblings, Raymond began his criminal career as a necrophiliac grave robber, similar to Nubbins Sawyer from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who unearthed crypts to steal jewelry for his trinket box. Unsatisfied with material possessions, Raymond has now graduated to a full-fledged serial killer, invading people's homes after murdering his parents, cutting off their ears, noses, and lips, eating the faces of men and women like a ghoul who wandered out of the cemetery in Night of the Living Dead. Inexplicably, he prefers the taste of male flesh, neatly explaining why he spares Jessie despite having ample opportunities to make a meal out of her immobile body.
Cinematographer Michael Fimognari, operating under Flanagan's empathetic and character-centric direction, maintains the focus of his camera on Jessie to submerge the audience in her emotional evolution, rarely straying from her terrified visage. Prior to the commencement of the ordeal, Fimognari captures the picturesque gorgeousness of the lake-house setting -- the abundant trees that encircle the home, beneath a baby-blue sky full of puffy, milky-white clouds, backgrounded by a lake. Isolated, affluent, and utterly serene, the setting stands in stark contrast to the gruesome nightmare waiting to unfold within the confines of the bedroom. Fimognari's presentation of death and mutilation is discreet, panning his camera to a close-up of Gerald's hand lying immobile on the floor beside the bed. A solar eclipse, which marks a pivotal moment in Jessie's childhood, casts a blood-red glow over the sky in a backside wide shot of 12-year-old Jessie (Chiara Aurelia) and her father sitting on a bench, basking in the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle, as well as both versions of Jessie, their faces illuminated in red to reflect their perseverance and reclamation of identity.
During an argument between Jessie's parents regarding her preferential affection for her father, Fimognari uses shallow focus to blur Thomas and Siegel's faces in the background on the left side of the frame, while keeping Aurelia's curiously eavesdropping face in focus in the foreground on the right side. Likewise, the faces of Jessie's mom and younger siblings are blurred at the dinner table to symbolize Jessie's isolation from the rest of her family and her enslavement to her father. As a child, Jessie's world revolved around her father, ultimately to a toxic effect, and not even the presence of her mother, brother, or sister could provide comfort or rescue.
Flanagan is adept at wringing suspense out of his setting without feeling obligated to pay it off with jump scares, cutting to shots of window curtains blowing peacefully yet ominously in the nighttime breeze, priming us for the emergence of a creature already inside the bedroom with Jessie, and preceding the arrival of a hungry, flesh-eating stray dog with pitter-patter footsteps and a shadow projected onto the door casing and adjacent wall.
The overwhelming weight of Gerald's Game hinges on the shoulders of Carla Gugino, considering that she spends the majority of the runtime tethered to bedposts, unable to pull her hands through the cuffs, and she carries it with the spellbinding, Oscar-worthy, three-dimensional performance of her career, navigating a profound internal journey from a dutiful wife desperate to make her husband happy at any cost to a powerless damsel in distress to an intelligent, resourceful, and determined survivor finally willing to confront a lifetime of sexual and emotional abuse to face her present danger and crawl out of the hole in which she's allowed herself to remain buried since the age of 12. At first, Jessie can only think to scream and plead her way to safety. With a little more time and reflection, she comes up with the ingenious idea to fold the tag of her slip into a straw from which to drink the leftover water of Gerald's precoital Viagra glass. Gugino is preternatural in her role commitment, inhabiting a character who's physically shackled to a bed, yet somehow fleshing her out into a beautifully realized character with a lifetime of pain, regret, fear, insecurity, and irrepressible heart.
She begins her journey as a submissive wife, appearing to live a blissful life of the utmost privilege and security, married to a high-powered lawyer, able to afford a lake house and four Kobe steaks, $200 each. However, from the opening car ride, Gugino conveys an undertone of disquiet beneath her passively agreeable smile, portraying Jessie as an emotionally stunted woman-child who measures every word that she utters to Gerald. In a lot of ways, Jessie shares a kinship with a former King heroine, Beverly Marsh from It. Both women grew up under the oppressive thumb of a sexually abusive father, distorting their perception of men and paving the way for a misguided attraction to like-minded older men who doubled as father figures.
Once the literal cuffs are locked around her wrists, Gerald no longer in the picture save her fracturing mind, Gugino unleashes her pent-up insecurity and discomfort, dissolving into tears of hysteria. Her eyes widen in horror before narrowing in weariness, she hyperventilates and screams helplessly at the top of her lungs, her lower eyelids turn puffy and pink. She curls into a ball of despair, burying her face between her legs to avoid the heinous sight of her husband's corpse being turned into dog chow. Jessie's initial reaction is to convince herself that Gerald is still alive and toying with her to cull a convincing damsel-in-distress performance, so Gugino laughs and smiles desperately through her tears, begging Gerald to wake up and promising to let him defile her if it ultimately leads to her freedom. With no neighbors to overhear her screams, and her cellphone tauntingly out of reach on the nightstand, Jessie has only herself to depend on to uncuff both physically and psychologically. Gugino exhibits incredible range in playing opposite a more composed, self-assured, clear-thinking version of herself, deriving self-esteem and a renewed will to live through her own empowering words.
As Jessie's not-so-better but certainly deader half, Bruce Greenwood tears into his titular role with devilish gusto, presenting Gerald as a deceptively mild-mannered, debonair man struggling to add spice to his rapidly dying marriage. Once his shirt comes off and the cuffs come out, Greenwood uplifts his placid demeanor to unveil the threatening libido and deep-seated lust for dominance that's been lurking below the surface for the past 11 years. It's hard to discern whether Gerald is in earnest or in character while enacting his rape fantasy, directing Jessie to scream for help, threatening to leave her shackled after she asks him to uncuff her wrists. "What if I won't?" he taunts twice in an ominously low tone. After the real Gerald hits the floor and his imaginary counterpart rises, Greenwood is permitted the freedom to cut loose, an opportunity he relishes as much as the dog feasting on the flesh of his forearms. Oozing a slimeball charisma, Greenwood imbues his hallucinatory role with a cutting, bone-dry wit as Gerald fesses up to his sexual inadequacies and continues to belittle his wife even in death, delivering lines of hard-hitting truth in an ominous whisper to get under Jessie's skin, and by extension our own.
In a subversion of his prior role as the friendly, down-to-earth, and helpful priest, Tom Hogan, in Ouija: Origin of Evil, Henry Thomas assumes the antagonistic role of Jessie's father (once again named Tom, interestingly enough), who serves as the catalyst for his daughter's present-day life-or-death predicament. Thomas portrays his child molester as a manipulative and self-pitying coward, weaponizing his pitiful eyes and soft, tender voice to disguise the mentally ill, narcissistic predator salivating to claw through his mild-mannered cage of an exterior. Tom represents the most despicable and pathetic form of human monster, using a childlike method of guilt and fear to coerce his oldest daughter to sit on his lap so he can masturbate to her exposed shoulder then swear to silence. In a trait similar to Charles Manson, Tom manipulates Jessie into believing both decisions were her idea. He doesn't demand that she sit on his lap or remain silent. Rather, he projects both of his desires onto her. In a refreshing deviation from the trope of the outwardly perverted, salivating-from-the-lips child molester a la Alvin Marsh in Andy Muschietti's big-screen remake of It, Tom is far more subtle and conflicted, refraining from actually assaulting his daughter (the only person he touches is himself) and displaying a flash of remorse and shame afterward.
Arguably more disturbing and shattering than the act of sexual violence itself is the follow-up scene in Jessie's bedroom. As father and daughter sit beside one another on the latter's bed, both processing what just happened during the eclipse, Tom disingenuously insists that they divulge their secret to her mother, shrewd enough to know that Jessie won't want to. Chiara Aurelia delivers a heartbreaking and vulnerable performance in this excruciating two-hander exchange, matching the passive personality of the present-day Jessie into whom she will grow. As a 12-year-old trapped between her inherent love for her father and her confusion and disgust with the monster he's just revealed himself to be, Aurelia paints a raw portrait of childhood innocence shattered to bits, begging her father not to tell her mom and siblings, promising to never share his misdeed with a single soul, tears of shame, panic, and desperation welling from her eyes, containing her initial discomfiture beneath an acquiescent, withdrawn exterior.
When Tom confesses to Jessie that his action on the bench was shameful, he turns away from her, signifying a rare moment of truth-telling. It was only easy to look her in the eye whenever uttering a lie. That's how Jessie knew he meant it. When 12-year-old Jessie first arrives at her summer lake house with her family, she comments, "It's so much smaller than I remember." "That's because you're bigger," reasons Tom. Flanagan and Howard link that past line to Jessie's face-to-face confrontation with the Moonlight Man in the present to illustrate her inner growth and renewed empowerment. Along the way, they use Jessie's internal dialogues to elucidate the rationale behind her decision-making in a way that would go inexplicable without. For example, Jessie remembers that shortly before her father scarred her for life, she had gotten her period, drawing a connection between Tom's uncontrollable urge to release his infatuation and the stray dog's thirst for Gerald's blood. When a dog, animal or human, smells fresh blood, they'll come running, states imaginary Jessie. She also reminds her real self not to demonize the dog for eating Gerald's corpse despite her protests: it's only doing what it has to to survive, much like Jessie must do. The dialogue is vivid, intellectually stimulating, and thematically imaginative, serving as the engine that prevents the story from stagnating into a repetitive exercise in entrapment and self-pity.
Acting as his own editor, Flanagan weaves the flashbacks smoothly into his primary plot, utilizing them as windows into his protagonist's psyche to shed a much-deserved spotlight on her childhood of sexual abuse. He highlights key moments -- Jessie's strained relationship with her mother, who preferred to bury her head in the sand rather than confront the monstrosities of her husband, her life-altering (however nonphysical) objectification by her father, his use of manipulation to silence her, and a self-inflicted injury with a water glass that helps her present self conceive of her ultimate solution -- without spoiling the pervading air of claustrophobia or distracting from the urgency of her current circumstance. They simply offer Jessie and the viewer a respite from her suffering. If she can't escape physically, she at least has the option to unlock the cuffs in her own mind. Flanagan sparingly uses jump cuts to transport us into Jessie's increasingly disoriented headspace, teleporting posthumous Gerald from Jessie's bedside to a window a few feet away in the blink of an eye.
Eventually, Flanagan severs the boundary between the past and present by cleverly bleeding the flashbacks into the latter scenes, all leading up to the show-stopping "degloving" sequence in which Jessie smashes her water glass against a bedpost, embeds a shard within the wood, and carefully slices her wrist to slide her hand free from the cuff, using her blood as a lubricant. Flanagan milks this instantly iconic moment of truth for every last drop of cringe-inducing, gag-reflex-testing horror (and Jessie's blood), refusing to speed past the grisly details or turn a blind eye to them. If Jessie has to put herself through this torture, then we have to watch and suffer alongside her, Flanagan seems to say. It's a harrowing and gruesomely detailed sight to endure, with Flanagan cutting from the river of blood dripping down her wrist to close-ups of Gugino's face, contorted with screaming anguish, to the skin on her bloody hand slowly peeling off in the shape of an actual glove as she slips her hand through the cuff. At once, Flanagan invites you to share in Jessie's unimaginable agony as well as her exhilaration to finally be free.
The opening song, "Bring It On Home to Me" by Sam Cooke, plays diegetically over an overhead shot of Gerald and Jessie packing their suitcases in their hometown bedroom, emanating from their car radio. Upon initial sound, Cooke's soul music establishes an atmosphere of romance to accompany the married couple en route to their glamorous destination. Later on in a flashback, however, Flanagan curdles the song into yet another element of Jessie's traumatic childhood, clarifying her motivation for abruptly turning it off in the car. For the majority of Gerald's Game, Flanagan allows the proceedings to unfold in the silence of the night, all the better to convey Jessie's solitude and accentuate the organically unsettling ambient noises: the creaks of a door, the hostile growls and frightened whimpers of the dog that portend the Moonlight Man's arrival.
In the end, with her degloved right hand bandaged and still not quite fully functional, Jessie confronts her only living source of masculine terror face to face. Arriving in a courtroom just in time to witness Raymond Joubert's arraignment, Jessie visualizes the faces of her deceased former oppressors, Tom and Gerald, in place of Joubert's, and uses him as an outlet for the resentment they instilled in her. Essentially, she stands up to her father and late husband through the Moonlight Man. Not through a melodramatic outburst or comedically gratifying punch to the face, but rather a single, simple line uttered in a most steady voice: "You're so much smaller than I remember." The equivalent of telling a monster how much scarier they are in the dark than the light.
After cutting the pompous behemoth down to size, Jessie calmly exits the courtroom, puts on a pair of sunglasses, and enjoys a triumphant walk down the street under the glare of the sun, symbolizing her hard-earned liberation from the darkness of male toxicity and reentrance into the sunlight of independence. Flanagan doesn't hammer this closing metaphor home with a heavy hand, instead allowing the simplicity and serenity of the image to speak for itself.
Using a nightmarishly unnerving setup as the springboard for a thematically profound, emotionally resonant, and mind-blowingly layered survival story that metamorphoses into an empowering psychological journey of self-discovery, resilience, healing, and self-love, Gerald's Game is a masterful blend of slow-burning suspense, minimalist storytelling, and quietly reflective character study, punctuated by a gush of queasily realistic gore. It doesn't even feel like a horror film because of how deeply Flanagan grounds his story in reality, how expertly he camouflages his monster-in-the-dark horror beneath the all-too-real horror of child abuse. Not since The Silence of the Lambs has a psychological horror film utilized its genre to tell a humanist story that's by turns heart-stopping, heartbreaking, multifaceted, complex, and character-oriented, brought to life by a spellbinding star performance.
9/10
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