Gerald's Game

Gerald's Game (2017) is about a woman handcuffed to a bed and left alone after her husband dies. Jessie and Gerald go to an isolated lake house. He proposes a game and cuffs her to the bedframe. She changes her mind, they argue, and he has a heart attack and dies. The house is empty, the phone is out of reach, and nobody is coming. The book was considered unfilmable for years because most of it happens inside one person's head. Flanagan's solution: Jessie hallucinates, and her dead husband and another version of herself appear in the room and talk to her. The interior monologue becomes dialogue. The second layer is childhood. A day of a solar eclipse that Jessie remembers, and something that happened that day, is the real subject of the whole story. The most discussed scene is the escape attempt. We will not describe it, but the camera does not look away and it is genuinely unbearable. Carla Gugino plays almost all of it alone. Stephen King praised the film openly. There is an explanation in the final section that some viewers find unnecessary; it was contested in the book as well. It was released on Netflix. It runs 103 minutes. Good for: psychological thriller, King adaptations, and single location films. Less good for: sexual abuse is treated directly and one scene is physically very hard to watch.