Gerald’s Game is a new Stephen King movie that premiered on Netflix Friday night. It’s based on one of his books that I thought was unfilmable when I read it 30 some years ago… but they pulled it off and actually made a surprisingly good movie.
Gerald’s Game is about a married couple (Carla Gugino and Bruce Grenwood) who’s marriage has lost its luster. They head up to a house in the middle of nowhere and decide to add some kink to their sex life. He handcuffs her to the bed and then has a heart attack and dies. The whole movie (and book) is about how she figures out how to survive handcuffed to a bed with both keys and a phone just out of reach. Oh, and a stray dog that finds its way into the house to eat her husband’s body.
I thought this was unfilmable because A) she’s naked and handcuffed to a bed (she’s in a slip in the movie) and B) it takes place in her thoughts and otherwise in one room over the course of a couple days. The movie handles this second part by having her hallucinate her husband and a version of herself who are neither dead nor handcuffed to a bed. This gives the film some additional human interaction and breathing room. Plus it shows events that happened to her during an eclipse when she was a twelve year old girl so that gets the viewer out of the house as well.
So the movie is able to work as a movie without feeling like ninety minutes of Carla Gugino struggling against her handcuffs. And the first fifteen minutes or so of her handcuffed did challenge my patience but then the movie really kicked in with good storytelling and events (which I’d forgotten from the novel). It adds in some possibly supernatural events which may be as much hallucinations as her conversations with herself and her dead husband. And, of course, it has a dog busy eating up her husband.
For a movie based around a failed kinky sexcapade, the movie handles its sexual content with taste as well. It’s not as sordid as the premise suggests. That said, her memories are full of awkward sexual situations that, if played worse, would be tawdry and distasteful. But the films knows the gravity of what it shows and doesn’t play it for cheap thrills. Indeed, it’s part of an overall theme of what little control a girl or woman can have in a relationship with emotionally domineering and manipulative men.
Many kudos to Carla Gugino, who I’ve always liked but also to Bruce Greenwood who I thought would get the short end of the acting stick. Gugino acts the hell out of a part that calls her to be stuck in a bad situation, growing increasingly frustrated and desperate as the hours pass.
So overall, I was really surprised by how much I liked this adaptation. It runs on a little longer than I expected but I didn’t lose patience with it. It manages to find creative and well-acted ways to deal with the tight situation and it does it all with reasonable class (for a suspense thrills with this plot, anyway). It’s a little slow to get going but then proves it knows how to handle the situation with tension, drama, and suspense. If you have Netflix, check it out if you aren’t 100% turned off by the premise. Just make sure you give it some breathing room for the suspense and tension to really kick in.
Score: 86