Gerald's Game is a fucking great idea. It's simple. It's easy to imagine. It requires very little to set in motion. It is also the equivalent of a one-joke sketch on SNL. After the first big beat, what do you do with it? The movie clocks in at 103 minutes. Even that is too long. The best version of this movie shouldn't be a second over 90 minutes and could even excuse getting down to 80. I wasn't crazy about any of the tricks the movie uses to buy time. The fantasies, the flashbacks, and especially the creepy "man of the moonlight" all felt like the equivalent of padding a term paper with redundant sentences to reach a required page count. I've seen enough movies that use limited space to great effect - like Locke or Buried - that I'm not giving this an immediate pass due to degree of difficulty. And, the parts that were simply about Carla Gugino trying to survive being handcuffed to a bed with a hungry dog ready to pounce were pretty good. OK, good is a bad word to use, because that part includes how she gets out of the cuffs -- I haven't squirmed and looked away so much while watching something since the needle pit in Saw II*. Perhaps "effective" is a better word than "good". Regardless, the "Carla Gugino tries to get out of this awkward and perilous situation alive" movie is great.
*For the record, there's other disturbing things I've seen in more recent movies. I've just seen Saw II more recently.
I get the need to have her talking her way through the situation with projections of herself and her dead husband. Other confined movies can use cell phones. That's not an option in this, so imagined people is pretty almost required. It all got a little arch though: less like she was battling her own impulses and thoughts and more like she was fighting actual ghosts or demons. I mentally checked out of the movie when it became about her being abused as a child. I spent my One Big Leap on Gugino getting trapped and her husband dying and all the neighbors being gone. Adding the obvious metaphor of a woman trapped physically by a sexual act in the present being trapped mentally by a sexual act in the past was too contrived to forgive. And all that nonsense about the "man in the moonlight" is out of another movie entirely and had no business in this one. Even if that was part of the original Stephen King story, it just didn't work.
It's funny looking at my issues with the movie: flashbacks to prior trauma, imagined sequences, and an unexplained malevolent force. It sure sounds like another Mike Flannagan film - one of my favorite movies of the last few years - Oculus. Granted, it makes all the difference in the world that Oculus is built around the idea of a haunted mirror. So, weird shit happening is the One Big Leap. Gerald's Game is built around Carla Gugino getting trapped. Too much of what follows is not a natural consequence of the set up.
It's a shame that I bought so little about the story, because Carla Gugino is really good and Flanagan shoots a lot of it well. It starts off, like a lot of Stephen King adaptations, looking really bland. It's almost like a made-for-TV movie how it's shot. As the screws turn, the movie looks a lot more polished and genuinely unnerving. That's all intentional and works well.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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