Jacob's 31 Days of Halloween - Day 3: Gerald's Game

Gerald's Game

Most Seinfeld fans will be familiar with the episode where George is with a woman who cuffs him to the bed but then she has to leave unexpectedly, leaving him alone in her apartment, cuffed to her bed. Four months after that episode aired, Stephen King's novel Gerald's Game was published, which essentially presents the exact same situation except this time the woman is cuffed to the bed and the man dies. 25 years later, Netflix turned it into a movie.

Gerald's Game is one of those great "What would you do?" ideas, like the question "What would you do if you had the powers of God?" made Bruce Almighty and "What would you do if you were buried alive?" made Buried. "What would you do if the guy who cuffed you to the bed suddenly died?" may not be as common of a question, but it's essentially the same as being buried alive; it's a survival film, but on more than one level.

Spoilers.

After Jessie has been dropped into this situation, she does what anyone would do: go crazy. Versions of both her dead husband and herself appear to talk her through the situation and to weigh her options of survival. This takes us to occasional flashbacks to her as a child where her father was sexually inappropriate with her. It's the typical kind of intimate, uncomfortable, bordering on unnecessary detail you'd expect from a Stephen King novel, but in the case of this kind of story, where the situation is so simple that the details are everything, it works.

Carla Gugino is wonderful at playing every aspect of her character; it's inarguably her movie and she nails it. Writer/Director Mike Flanagan does a great job of simply telling the story in a very straightforward way (I highly recommend his earlier film Oculus), and I commend him for also editing the thing all by himself.

While they could've maybe gone farther with how crazy she goes and blurred the lines between fantasy and reality even more, I like the way they keep almost everything grounded in reality (particularly the Moonlight Man, which was a twist I loved). It gives the whole story a sense of realism, like this could've really happened.

Though there are a few logic concerns (Why would they leave the door open? How had they had a multiple-month dry spell without ever addressing his aggressive fantasies?), the movie as a whole is intriguing and entertaining from start to finish. If you're in the mood for something dark and twisted this Halloween season, this is a solid one to check out.