Starring Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood. Directed by Mike Flanagan.

Yeah, we’re back with Stephen King. You can’t keep the lad off the screen, but credit where credit has always been due, when a movie based on his work gets it right, it gets it bloody right. Yes, King’s horror It is still playing in a cinema near you, but for those who prefer their horror psychological and streamable, Netflix has the anti-date movie for you. There will be no chill with this Netflix movie.

From Mike Flanaganu00a0 (Hush, Oculus, Ouija: Origin of Evil)u00a0comes this take on the 1992 Stephen King novel long thought to be one of his lesser works and also believed by many to be unfilmable. The story is deceptively simple: a married couple, Gerald and Jessie Burlingame, go to their remote cabin to rekindle their ailing marriage, when a sex game goes wrong, and Gerald ends up dead, Jessie realises she’s trapped handcuffed to the bed with no mean of escape, and an apparently hungry stray dog waits for the sun to go down.









King is a horror master. We all know this, just like we know that when his horror works best, it’s not the supernatural, it’s the psychological. His greatest monsters were never Randall Flagg or Pennywise, they were the real monsters in the real world. Like Kurt Dussander, Warden Norton, Annie Wilkes and Mrs Carmody, his finest villains are the ones we pass on the street every day.

In Gerald’s Game, much like with the frankly brilliant Hush, Flanagan makes the most of a minimal cast and a sparse location. He has two leads, who show that while they’ve mainly been secondary players for years, they’re now two of the best players in Hollywood. Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood give awards-worthy performances as a married couple with an age difference, and a dark secret to be uncovered. Neither play their hand straight away, but both make you intrigued by the characters even when things are becoming twisty and strange.

Flanagan is clearly a talented horror film maker, but more than that he has an eye for tension. The film is very clever in it’s setting up of elements that will later be important, either lines of dialogue, or the placing of items. It seems strange and almost awkward at first, until it makes perfect sense why he’s taking the time to place each item where it is. It helps to give the film a sense of space, or lack of it. Despite the size of the room Jessie finds herself stuck in, she barely has the bed to move about on.