Netflix continues to give the goods with a recent addition to it's self-made content library. Gerald's Game is an adaption of Stephen King's 1992 novel of the same name.

Who doesn't love Stephen King's work?

Most of King's novels are haunting. I'd like to say I've read them all, but, man, there is 56 of them. This isn't including the various other works he's produced. He's a great author that does a remarkable job of combining characters, stories, and environment. Gerald's Game is no exception.

I remember reading Game sometime in the 90's as a teenage boy. It's stayed with me for a variety of reasons. The strangeness of the novel. It's basically just a lady handcuffed to a bed in a room. Hallucinating. Fighting off a feral dog that's otherwise slowing eating her dead husband. Haunted at night by a monstrous apparition.

Haunted by her childhood memories of abuse, long closeted. Neglected.

I can't say that I could fully grasp the extent of the novel at the time. I just didn't have enough context. But, with age comes wisdom of sorts, or at least the understanding of what terrors can exist in this world. Terrors inflicted from people in positions of power. This is all too relevant considering the movement of the last year, and this novel, at the very least, tangentially relates to that movement.

Escaping this will take a sacrifice

How do you adapt this novel to film? As I mentioned, most of it takes place in a single room, with a single woman, chained to a single bed. To account for this, the movie does something similar to what was done in the novel; Jessie dreams up phantoms of not only her recently deceased husband, but also of herself. This hallucinated Jessie is immaculate. Hair and makeup in place. Calm, reassures, but firmly coaches Jessie at what to do.

And also insists that she remembers her past.

Her hallucinated husband, the titular Gerald, at first cajoles her. This ghost is a way of Jessie to flaggulate herself for being willfully blind to Gerald's nature. That he always had a darkness within him, ignored by Jessie for her desire of comfort, and servitude of a sort.

As she realizes this, Gerald becomes more of an ally, working along phantom-Jessie to help her connect the dots within her own memories, and also in the current life-and-death situation. Being handcuffed to a bed in the secluded wilderness. No hope of accidental visitation and recovery, Jessie was a "life-support system unplugged," dehydration the immediate concern.

This is compounded once the previously encountered dog arrives to start feasting on Gerald's corpse.

The ticking clocks pile up, first the thirst, then the dog. Jessie manages to recover some of the water on the shelf above her, and through some ingenuity spurred on by her visiting phantoms, she crafts a straw out of the tag recently attached to her lingerie (this was a rememberable point in the book as well, a sense of victory in a hopeless situation). Her thirst slacked somewhat for the moment, the dog remains, and in the first night a new visitor arrives.

look closely

As if the terror of the situation wasn't enough, we get our first view of this creepy figure, presenting a box of grave-stolen artifacts and bones.

After this comes perhaps one of the best lines of the movie, delivered by the phantom Gerald as Jessie tries to deny the reality of her apprehension of the "Moonlight Man"

People are safe from ghouls and ghosts and the living dead in the daylight. And they're usually safe from them at night, if they're with others. But a person alone in the dark... women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they scream for help, who knows what might answer. Who knows what people see in the moment of their solitary death. Is it so hard to believe that some of them might have died of fear? No matter what the words on the death certificate say... died of fear... because they saw, at their bedside, the Moonlight Man. Maybe that's just what death looks like.

Ecliptic eyes

At this point Jessie memories of her burgeoning adolescence begin to come in force. Memories of her family visit to a lake house in advance of a solar eclipse. Her pregnant mother and father's strained relationship. Her father's assault of her during the height of the eclipse. The subsequent insistence by him that it's kept a secret. Her first set of chains, chains of silence.

This culminates in the realization of an escape route, driven by her memory of breaking a glass for the draining anxiety of keeping this secret at a family dinner. The shards of glass cut her hand. Slippery blood leaking out.

Which leads to one of the most sympathetic pain inducing scenes i've seen in film in quite a while. Ever heard of degloving?

For the sake of any readers that haven't seen the film yet, I won't go into too much more detail other than to say that I thought this was a very good movie, and a very good adaptation of King's novel. The ending was perhaps the weakest part, but this is relative. It's reduced to something of a voiceover data dump, but there is a charming scene with Jessie and her younger self, full of self-knowledge at the moment of the eclipse. Smiling, hopeful, declaring it's time for the Sun to finally come back out.

Some random thoughts follow, but if you enjoyed this review please give me a follow @mattuebel and let me know in the comments. This support is what encourages me to keep writing. Thanks!

Misc

• I can only hope to be as well toned as Bruce Greenwood when I am 61.
• I really felt that it would have been possible to slid the handcuff up and pull by the chain hard enough to break one of the posts. No point of this other than to say that maybe the prop setup should have been different, although it wasn't too distracting.
• Really interesting how the Moonlight Man casually broke his own handcuffs. Don't know how much I should read into that.
• The initial reveal of the Moonlight Man was perhaps one of the most sinister things I've seen in a while, and I like to imagine how it would be for anybody unfamiliar with the material. At first, you just see a vague outline, and then slowly more revealed.