Film Review: Gerald's Game

Film Review:

Gerald's Game

LOOKING to spice up your long dead marriage? Got some unresolved childhood trauma? Well, does your quasi-abusive husband have a holiday for you!

Handcuffs included.

Picturesque Woodlands

WHEN you're in the middle of a Stephen King adaptation you're not on solid ground, but when you start off driving through rural woodlands probably safe to say you've not got a tremendous time ahead of you. That's where Jessie and her husband Gerald find themselves, however. They're on a holiday retreat to revive their ailing relationship. In a cabin in the middle of nowhere they look to rekindle their romance in the bedroom - but after Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed, he suffers a heart attack and - rather rudely - dies, leaving her chained to the bed.

It's a smashing premise. The setting is has an eerie beauty to it, Flanagan's style feels like a nice de-emphasis of style that allows drama and character focus. Subtlety is a bi-word that I'm going to keep going back to because it's so much of what is great about the movie, and when that subtlety goes away?

Early on, the film establishes a pattern: subtly and tensely establish themes or characteristics or conflicts that simmer, before coming out and having characters explain to the audience what was meant to have been conveyed already in case we have recently been lobotomised. The plotting is controlled and subtle, but the script often doesn't trust the audience - or, perhaps, doesn't quite know how to fill out its running time - so often undercuts those small moments and small ideas. Part of this might be a function the content of the source material.

To Film, the Unfilmable Film!

GERALD'S Game, the theory goes, is an unfilmable novel. Reading between the lines, as it were, the reason for this is the internality of the original story. It's a woman chained to a bed angsting and feeling hungry and sore. Not conventionally the stuff of escapism. Psychological thrillers often draw heavily from horror and crime set-pieces, as well as art-house cinema, to propel the story along and a story with a character just strapped to a bed doesn't allow for much of that. Instead, it's about an unspoken internal struggle.

Save for the fact that there is in fact plenty of talking. The moment the film should lapse into a quiet visual struggle for survival it never stops shutting up. It gives us a lots of details about the failing relationship, about the characters and especially Jessie's childhood. Most of these details are welcome, in and of themselves at least. The way they are reached is through exposition. The movie allows itself to be easy to watch and easy to follow by being so explicit and baldfaced about giving us such information.

As a horror fan, I'm not much of a fan of jump scares - jump scares are cheap and easy, but even worse they dispel the tension. They're a release. They allow the audience to get comfy in the fact that the horror has revealed itself and now either the protagonist escapes, wins or dies. It allows us a comparative level of safety as viewers. Mike Flanagan, to his credit, doesn't really do jumpscares (although there is one in this movie, and to be fair it's genuinely excellent). What happens with the dialogue, and the hallucinations that say the dialogue, is they help create a feeling of safety for the viewer. It's easier to watch a film because of it, and a story about a woman strapped to a bed whilst horrible things both happen around and rise from her past shouldn't be an easy watch.

Flanagan Back Again

BEEN a busy old few years for good ol' Mike Flanagan. As mentioned earlier, he's no James Won style jumpscarer or set-piece dependent horror filmmaker. He doesn't go for you Eli Roth shock tactics. His plotting foreshadows nicely, and his touch with characters is decent. Between a slew of well received horrors, the success of his King adaptations (he even directed Doctor Sleep, The Shining's sequel) and the way The Haunting of Hill House captured a digital audience, he seems to have taken the reigns on mainstream horror cinema for recent times.

Having seen 2019's largely excellent adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, I found it hard to separate that viewing experience from this. As a fan of the novel, the Netflix Hill House series always felt like it owed much more to both It and The Shining. A lot of the best and worst things about Hill House are also present in Gerald's Game, beyond just the shared cast. Dodgy acting, especially from younger actors, and an inability to write dialogue for children; great splicing together of the past and present, taking great pains to route character traits and decisions in their past. A restrained touch on traditional horror visuals and set pieces. A stark visual style, and a subtle expression of place as important; a tendency to over-explain and general overwriting, without letting scenes or ideas breath to percolate.

For what it is worth, Carla Gugino deserves a shout for an utterly fantastic performance. There might be shaky ones in there, but she's a titan and helps to elevate the film to a level it would not be at without her.

A Good Bone Structure

IT'S a shame that Gerald's Game is at great pains to point out how the themes and character moments connect, because there's a clarity and power to them that should have worked. From the ideas of blood and meet, to the stray dog, to Jessie's past and Jessie's present, from the Moonlight Man to the handcuffs it all works brilliantly until pointed out. Once laid so bare, it seems clunky. Artless.

For all of the talk of Flanagan's restraint, he does have moments of flair in the set-piece. Whenever the enigmatic Moonlight Man is on-screen the movie feels like it has an intensity that is not only excellent on a horror level, but feels like it is a meaningful character moment. He knows when to strike, and when he does it is effective.

WITHOUT wanting to properly wade into spoilers, the ending fell very flat for me. Like, to the point that it might have tipped the balance from a film with a lot of very good and kinda bad and surprisingly boring into just bad. Then again, maybe that makes him the perfect modern visual heir to Stephen King - perhaps lacking his idiosyncratic madness, but fully able to cover most of his unpredictable range in any given piece.