Thriller Thursdays: Gerald’s Game - A sonata of scars & scares

In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

Gerald's Game begins innocently enough, though no sex game is virtuous. Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) are trying to spice up a decade-old marriage, and have come to their lonely summer home in the woods. Gerald is determined to succeed, and has packed both handcuffs and a bottle of Viagra. Nothing is left to chance.

Until two things happen.

Gerald handcuffs Jessie, and slowly begins a sexy roleplay game. He purrs "Daddy’s gonna get what Daddy wants” and, unexpectedly, Jessie gets agitated and screams “I don’t like this. F**king stop!”  Gerald is completely confused, but before he can comprehend anything, he has a heart attack and drops dead. And in his wake, he leaves behind a completely incredulous and dismayed Jessie, handcuffed to a sturdy four poster bed, with not a soul in sight.

Isn’t it a perfect setting for the ultimate horror thriller film? But then again, as the film unravels, one realises that the thrill is the horror, but the horror lies elsewhere.

Gerald’s Game is something else altogether. It is a film based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. Like many of King’s stories, it starts with a happenstance, only to lead the tale elsewhere. However, signals of what is to follow come early in the film.

In the early scenes, as the couple make their way to their hideout, Gerald tries a little foreplay in the car, and is gently rebuffed. Then there is news on the radio about local burglaries, and as they are about to reach their cottage, they see a wild dog in the middle of the road. When they reach the cottage, Jessie steps out and finds the dog approach her. She goes inside, takes out some neatly packed meat and feeds him. Gerald comes out and tells her that she’d just fed him some rare Kobe steak which cost him $200 a piece!

As the story unravels, each of these scenes makes sense symbolically. And one realises that this incredible tale is a searing metaphor for the many things that have gone wrong in Jessie's life.

It would be revealing to say too much, for even one strand of the plot would untangle the calamitous story at the core of the film. But this one room, the shackles, the dog, and the truths tumbling out as hallucinations, are all part of a life half-lived but fully-dimmed.

Jessie's inner demons start to come out, in living, breathing avatars, and fill her room up, engendering confessions, bringing back old hauntings, and making her revisit old decisions. She is made to confront some of the most catastrophic truths of herself, which she had buried deep inside.

While truths find release, in these deleterious conversations, horror finds a home in a simple scene where nothing happens except a conversation. Rarely have six minutes of a conversation been more devastating - just two people sitting on a bed, talking. One gentle and tentative, the other sure and insidious, pushing, cajoling, like taking a masterclass in manipulation, slowly piercing the other’s soul with a metaphysical stiletto. No blood is shed even as sunshine falls all over. That gentlest of pellucid light, the kind in which one dreams of the sea or flower-filled meadows, is only a cover for the clinical decimation occurring underneath, slice by slice, part by part, molecule by molecule.

In one of the last scenes in the film, Jessie confronts her symbolic nemesis, and looks at the towering and frightening figure and simply says "You are so much smaller than I remember." In her response, lay the seed from which sprang her guts to confront life. After encountering all the wild dogs in her life, after hearing a woman described as 'a life support system for a cunt'; after hearing that her problem as a person was her continuous state of "problem, panic, deny", Jessie's survival as a person lay in squeezing herself out of her shackles, however physically or metaphysically bloodied she might be, because the alternative was simple - continuous bouts of a thousand deaths.

This terrific film adapts a book which was considered unfilmable for a long time, and has converted the tale into a journey of revelations. Carla Gugino delivers a stellar performance as Jessie, as she goes through the entirety of the film in shackles but still manages to free the viewer in gruelling but magical ways. Bruce Greenwood as Gerald is all entitlement as any man who has the privilege of being a man. In his demeanour and cockiness, he is blind to his own realities, and is confident that he can blind others too. The sound design of the film ensures music (The Newton Brothers) is minimal, letting the noises of the night and a lonely room speak out as characters, filling the heart with hauntings.

And director Mike Flanagan holds the film together in a tight claustrophobic fist, letting the tale find its twists and finalities through its deep valley of pain and realizations. And it's his confidence as a master craftsman that he doesn't shy away from being in the room for long stretches to let its darkness haunt the viewer. But even as he lets the shadows, the moonlight, and the red-fringed eclipse throw frightening images, at no point does he forget that the greatest terror of all is when we humans have to confront our own truths.

Trivia

1. This is the fourth collaboration between the husband-and-wife duo of Kate Siegel and Mike Flanagan, after Oculus, Hush, and Ouija: Origin of Evil.
2. Midnight Mass is the book that Jessie throws at the dog in this movie, and it's the same book which was written by Kate Siegel's character in Hush which was also directed by her husband Mike Flanagan.
3. The story goes that Mike Flanagan carried a copy of the book Gerald’s Game to all meetings because it was his favourite Stephen King book, and he dreamt of making a movie on it when he was a teenager.

Watch Gerald's Game here .

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)