For Jess (Carla Gugino), her nightmare scenario has arrived. Her husband, Gerald (Bruce Greenwood), has got it in his head that they are about to save their marriage with a trip to a summer home. He’s got ideas. He’s got Viagra. He’s got shockingly chiseled abs for a man in his 60s, especially when you consider the fact that he needs to use the drug in the preceding sentence.
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| Photo credit: Gerald's Game/IMDb |
And that’s before he handcuffs her to the bed and dies of a heart attack, leaving the key tantalizingly close but just out of reach atop a dresser across the room.
In Gerald’s Game, director Mike Flanagan (Hush) takes the premise of Stephen King’s “unadaptable” novel and goes spelunking through the psyche of a woman who has been abused most of her life and run away from the bad feelings and scars that such abuse has caused her.
But those scars are hard to stage in engaging, cinematic ways, particularly when you are locked in a single room with little hope of escape—and a hungry stray dog waiting to eat a mourning, shocked wife after she succumbs to dehydration and hunger, joining her husband in the afterlife. In this, Flanagan handles himself well, with the help of some (welcomely) retro cinematography by Michael Fimognari—the movie’s color palette and deliberate camera movement would look right at home in the early 1990s, the last era in which King’s novels were adapted at the same blistering a pace we have seen in 2017. By holding the camera ominously on doors left open, glasses of water, and more, Flanagan and Fimognari show that they have internalized the lessons taught by the masters of tension, like Hitchcock and De Palma. They understand the power of instructing an audience what to expect from an environment, which plants the seed in a viewer’s mind that makes them think, “There is something wrong here and it’s about to bear rotten fruit.”
The most rotten of fruit is the core of Jess’s relationship with Gerald, a decayed marriage that had run its course years earlier. Their moments on the screen together before the handcuffs snap shut around her wrist are uncomfortable in that ordinary way—they are both not happy with their surroundings nor their place within this situation. Neither is confident, but they’re full of hope that maybe, just maybe, they can repair the parts of their life they have lost to marital neglect and too much drinking.
Once those handcuffs become a physical prison to match Jess’s mental incarceration and Gerald breathes his last, the movie finds its second gear. Greenwood “reprises” his role moments later, except this time he’s a ghostly projection cooked up by Jess’s brain. This version of Gerald’s personality runs at a louder volume than the original recipe, revealing how Jess sees her recently dearly departed husband. He’s a conniving trickster out to mess with his wife, whispering doubts into her ear, serving as a constant reminder to her to give up and settle for her fate, just as she did when she married him. Luckily for Jess (and those in the audience who would otherwise be subjected to a very boring film), she has another mental projection, a confident version of herself, to slow her harried breathing and calm her anxiety-riddled mind so that she can think clearly enough to finagle a way out of her newest prison. Gugino makes the most out of this dual role, playing off how one’s insecurities can manifest themselves on a spectrum of so many things from giving up to over-confidence and everything in between.
Gerald’s Game is less engaging when it finds itself trying to fill in the background of Jess’s life. Perhaps due to feeling constrained by telling a visual story within a single room, Flanagan, who co-wrote the script with Jeff Howard, spins a tale of abuse repeating itself throughout a person’s life. Conceptually this is strong. In execution, it leaves a lot to be desired in scenes starring Henry Thomas as Jess’s father being cartoonishly creepy with his 12-year-old daughter. Gone here is the nuance, the second guessing, the introspection, and the general juicy humanity of Jess’s marital struggles with Gerald, all of which appear lived in in a way that makes one suspect these things are part of the screenwriters’ lives and relationships. In the place of those complicated thoughts and feelings is a simplification of sexual abuse, which reads like a clueless non-victim telling you half-remembered details of a news report about a child molester.
Aside from the seeming non-authenticity of Jess’s backstory is that it falls into the trope of, “A woman can be nuanced and compelling only if she has been abused,” that crops up in thrillers all the time. The problem here is that Flanagan is not David Lynch—the only male director who seems to work well in this mode, and even he takes the occasional clunky approach to this material—and he does not have the same grasp of how to say these things in ways that feel correct. It's also an overly earnest story beat that betrays the dark, wry humor of humiliation that hangs over the film's premise. Who knows? Maybe he has a deeply personal background tied up in abuse, although I certainly hope that is not the case. The problem is that, even if Flanagan knows these things all too well, they don’t translate to the screen well, outside of deploying an evocative visual language in the flashbacks that involves an eclipse and reverse-negative photography. That imagery comes close to making up for the hamfisted writing, but it doesn’t cross the finish line.
And neither does the film’s biggest twist, which demystifies Gerald’s Game’s most upsetting image to the point that it sells out the fascinating storytelling conceit that drove the movie’s best moments earlier in its runtime. It’s such a blunder that it renders the spookiest, most dreamlike qualities moot and too reality-based to tap into the terrors at the bottom of every person’s psychology.
The intentional claustrophobia of the story leaves itself open, much like Jess’s and Gerald’s front door, to things that aren’t good for it—padding out the narrative with unnecessary and somewhat lazy character backstory and an eye-rolling twist that has no bearing on Jess’s struggle to get out of her handcuffed-to-the-bed predicament. When it fires on all cylinders, Gerald’s Game remains an ambiguous and haunting experience, but those moments are fleeting and easily interrupted.
Perhaps King’s novel truly was unadaptable.
Director: Mike Flanagan
Writers: Jeff Howard, Mike Flanagan
Starring: Carla Gugino, Henry Thomas, Bruce Greenwood
Rating: 3/5 stars
Available now on Netflix
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