Gerald's Game - Movie Review

Gerald's Game - Movie Review

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to the Stuckman's 5th annual Halloween special.

(00:22):
The entire month of October filled with scary horrific goodness.
Playing with Gerald's Game, the new Stephen King adaptation on Netflix now.
Not the Hay Arnold episode.
Gerald's Game is directed by Mike Flanagan, the man behind Oculus, Hush, and Ouija origin

(00:44):
of Evil, and it's, as I said, a Stephen King adaptation about Jesse and Gerald, an older
couple who have lost their romantic flame, and they go to an old cottage in the middle
of nowhere to have a sexual fantasy and discover, hopefully, some romance again.
He chains her to the bed with handcuffs, and then he has a heart attack and dies.

(01:09):
The cleaning people aren't due to show up in quite some time.
They have cut themselves off from their friends.
No one's coming to rescue Jesse.
They also left the front door open, and there's a rabid dog outside that's getting hungry.
Now we have a thriller.
Now if you were to go into a studio and try to get this movie made, and no one had heard
of Stephen King and nobody knew that it was a book by Stephen King, you'd probably say,

(01:31):
well, it's a captivity thriller all in one location.
You could shoot it for really cheap.
We'll get some good actors.
Yeah!
And the studio would go, yeah!
That's like the simple way to describe Gerald's Game.
A captivity thriller.
It's so much more than that, though.
And Stephen King's book was, and Mike Flanagan's adaptation of it understands that.

(01:53):
This is a character study.
It's about a woman with a past that's very horrific.
And this horrible situation she finds herself in, in which she begins to flash back to all
of those times in her life, and it connects to her present.
And she realizes why she's the person she is now.
And it's sort of like a self-discovery for her.

(02:15):
And it's beautiful.
This movie is one of the better Stephen King adaptations out there.
Gerald's Game is not one of King's best books.
It's certainly not a bad novel.
I mean, King cannot write a bad novel.
Even his worst novels, like maybe Cell, for instance, they're not bad.
It's just that it's not one of his better novels.

(02:35):
But as an adaptation, it gets everything in the book right.
There's a few things they've removed for time purposes, obviously.
And there's a few minor changes, like how the husband has the heart attack, and at what
point in time he has the heart attack.
And I like the changes.
They did a fantastic job here, and Flanagan has once again proven that he's one of the

(02:59):
best directors working in horror today, because he understands that a real horror movie is
not just about scaring an audience.
It's about presenting real characters in a situation that you can suddenly relate to,
no matter how supernatural it is or how realistic it is.
It's about the characters and the situations.

(03:20):
It's not just about scaring you.
And Flanagan once again has knocked it out of the park.
Carla Gugino in this movie is faced with an insurmountable task.
She has 99.9% of the screen time.
She is handcuffed for the majority of the movie, and she has to sell some of the most
serious acting and is almost always in a constant state of panic.

(03:43):
Now if you've ever watched actors work on a real set, you know how hard that is to do
take after take and to remain authentic.
This is one of the best performances I've seen so far this year.
And if there's any justice with the Academy, she'll get nominated.
She is fantastic.
It's her best work to date.
I've always been a fan of her, but this is definitely the best I have ever seen her.

(04:05):
And not to be overlooked is Bruce Greenwood, who does a really great job at presenting
a strange and dual character.
In fact, both of them have to play dual characters because once she starts to really lose her
mind and become dehydrated, she kind of has a good angel and a bad angel on her shoulder.
Both of these people speaking to her.
And they all have to play different versions of themselves.

(04:26):
And it's riveting.
Also, seamless in this film is the editing.
Flanagan has shown a really great flair for that in the past with movies like Oculus,
blending the past and the present to create a cohesive narrative.
And he does it here again extremely well with another really good performance from Henry
Thomas, who was also in Ouija Origin of Evil and very good in that film.

(04:49):
He's also creepy as hell and great here.
Obviously, everyone knows he was great in E.T., but he was also really strong in Psycho 4,
which isn't a great film by any means and certainly doesn't recapture the glory of
the first Psycho, but it's one of the more underrated performances I've seen from an
actor and Henry Thomas in general, I feel, is very underrated.

(05:12):
Once Night falls, and a certain individual shows up in this movie, it got under my skin.
There are some very unsettling and goosebumps inducing visuals in this movie that had me
on the edge of my seat.
If you can tune into this one on Netflix, I highly suggest doing so.
It's one of the better King adaptations I've seen.

(05:32):
It's not an amazing, like life-changing Shawshank Redemption film, but as an adaptation with
the limited things they could do with the novel and with the characters, they got it
all right.
The only issue I had with the movie is basically the same issue I had with the novel, so I

(05:52):
won't get into the spoilers because it involves the ending.
They nailed it.
I mean, it happened in the book.
It's great.
It's just that it doesn't always 100% mesh with the feel I got.
But I feel like on second viewing it might improve because once you understand the entire
film from beginning to end and the goals that they're going for with certain characters,

(06:14):
I feel like on second viewing it's not going to be so much of a problem.
I highly suggest Gerald's Game.
I'm going to give it an A.
What would you guys say is the goal with adapting source material?
For myself, it's either present it faithfully and accurately, or if you're going to change
something, improve upon what was already there.

(06:34):
Some of Darabon's films did that with King's novels.
I think Gerald's Game does it as well.
And please look forward to a ton more reviews in our fifth annual Halloween special.
This is a new release.
What I'm going to do throughout this month is whenever there's a newer horror movie that's
being released, like, say, Jigsaw, for instance, it'll be filmed in this awesome Halloween-style

(06:55):
background.
But I'm also going to be doing a ton of older horror movies with my wife and with some of
my friends.
We're all going to join together and do Hilariosities, and we'll do new releases and old releases.
It's going to be tons of fun.
Guys, thank you so much as always for watching, and look forward to more.
If you like this, you can click right here and get stuckmanized.