My Review

Stephen King’s 1992 novel Gerald’s Game takes place largely in one room, with a cast made up of a woman handcuffed to a bed, the corpse of her husband on the floor, a wild dog, and… that’s about it. It’s not the kind of story that lends itself easily to a film adaptation.

But in the new Netflix original film, director Mike Flanagan is more than up to the task. Flanagan is one of the most promising modern horror directors, with an already-impressive resume that includes Hush, Oculus, and Ouija: Origin of Evil. All of those movies are good, but more than anything else, they show potential — a writer/director/editor finding his footing and strengthening his voice. The best of the bunch, I believe, is Hush, a tightly-plotted story of a deaf woman alone in her house in the woods, struggling to survive a violent home invasion. Even that film, though, feels sort of like a minimalist filmmaking exercise — a storyteller trying to see what kinds of scares and story beats he can come up with that focus on sound, or lack thereof, with a cast consisting of basically two people, as a way to practice horror filmmaking.

But now, with Gerald’s Game, that practice made perfect and all of that potential has been realized. This is a grade-A, fully-formed, start-to-finish excellent horror movie. It’s at turns frightening and sad, and fantastical and grotesque. His camera knows when to let you look away, and when to make sure you take everything in, no matter how much you want to look away. And, let me tell you, some of Jessie’s attempts to free herself from the handcuffs will make you want to look away. The final act features one of the most gruesome moments I’ve ever seen in a horror film, made all the more impactful thanks to the emotionally deft storytelling that leads to that point.

This movie would not work as well as it does without Carla Gugino’s tour-de-force performance as the shackled Jessie. Thanks to the slowly (and then quickly) devolving state of Jessie’s sanity, she starts to have visions of her dead husband (played by Bruce Greenwood) and another version of herself warring over her, urging her to give up hope, or to find a way to survive, in a devil-and-angel-on-the-shoulder sort of scenario. This requires Flanagan to puts his actors through the wringer. Gugino has numerous conversations with herself, and she plays emotionally-composed angelic strength and utterly-destroyed, pitiful helplessness equally well. Greenwood spends most of the film in his underwear, and his character vacillates between boredom, pity, cruelty and evil. Both actors are phenomenal and play off each other very well, coming together in violent clashes and retreating to opposite sides of the room, voices raising to shouts and then falling almost to whispers, performing a sort of balletic insanity.