Gerald's Game is a 2017 American psychological horror thriller film directed by Mike Flanagan, and screenplay written by Flanagan with Jeff Howard. It is based on Stephen King's 1992 novel of the same title. The film stars Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood as a married couple.
Plot[]
The movie starts with Jessie and her husband Gerald Burlingame driving out to an isolated vacation house. They see a stray dog on the ride over eating roadkill off the road. Soon they arrive at the house. Once at the house, Jessie decides to feed the stray dog, giving it expensive steak. Gerald takes Viagra, then heads outside and tells Jessie to come to bed. They go in to the bedroom, leaving the front door open as they get ready to have sex.
Once in bed, Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed, and starts enacting a rape fantasy. This makes Jessie uncomfortable, and she tells him to stop. He gets angry and tells her this is why the relationship is ending. As they start to fight, Gerald suddenly starts shaking and has a heart attack, dying on top of Jessie.
Jessie spends a lot of time calling out for Gerald, hoping for him to be alive. Eventually the stray dog comes in, and despite Jessie trying her best, the dog takes a bite out of Gerald and starts eating him. After this, Jessie starts hallucinating, seeing Gerald and herself talking to her. Both hallucinations fight and taunt her, until Jessie realizes she is dehydrated. She remembers water Gerald left above the bed, and reaches for it. She is unable to drink the water in her current position, so she fashions a straw and puts it in the glass, allowing her to reach it.
Soon she falls asleep, but wakes up to a creepy figure in the room with a bag full of stuff. She beliefs this is a hallucination of death, and starts to freak out. Gerald calls her "mouse" to calm down, which then leads us into a flashback of her father and how he assaulted her when she was a child during an eclipse. Jessie comes back and realizes that she married Gerald, who was similar to her father. She also sees a bloody footprint, which could be from Death.
Jessie soon gets desperate, and realizes she needs to escape. Using a broken glass, she cuts her hand until it can slip out of the cuff. Once out, she grabs the key off a table and unlocks her other hand. Soon she is in the car, driving away. She ends up crashing, but is found by two strangers.
Later we see Jessie writing a letter to her past self. She writes about starting a foundation for sexually assaulted youth, and how she is doing better. She also writes how she learned that the man she saw in the corner of her room is real, and that he is in fact on trial for digging up crypts. She goes to visit him in court, before the movie ends.
Cast[]
- Carla Gugino as Jessie Burlingame
- Chiara Aurelia as Young Jesse
- Bruce Greenwood as Gerald Burlingame
- Carel Struycken as "Moonlight Man" / Raymond Andrew Joubert
- Henry Thomas as Tom
- Kate Siegel as Sally
- Adalyn Jones as Maddie
- Bryce Harper as James