Hola Dannie Here with Xiola Bleu's perspective on a truly horrifying tale from the master of terror Stephen King. I gotta admit, I tried watching this last night and really was not in the mood. Wish I would have had this review to warn me what I was getting into...
NETFLIX’S GERALD’S GAME SHOULD INCLUDE A TRIGGER WARNING
Hey, y’all. Xiola Bleu here.
Netflix has not been one to shy away from issues of sexual abuse in its original content. The streaming network took on multiple forms of rape and the destructive effects of those events in 13 REASONS WHY. With GERALD’S GAME, Netflix is confronting the subject of childhood sexual abuse head on. While 13 REASONS WHY offered a bleak story of absolute despair, each episode offering a new reason for why Hannah Baker killed herself, director Mike Flanagan and screenwriter Jeff Howard tried to make GERALD’S GAME a tale of empowerment more so than the original novel by Stephen King on which the movie is based.
My relationship to Stephen King’s novels started young and ended swiftly. The first book I picked up was CUJO (1981), which King admits he doesn’t even remember writing. The next ones I tried were IT (1986) and the DARK HALF (1989). I couldn’t get through any of them. For most of my life I thought of Stephen King as the real-life version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout. Trout is a fictional novelist who gets mentioned in several of Vonnegut’s books and is notorious for coming up with wonderful story lines but being a terrible writer. My opinions all changed in my adulthood when I read King’s memoir ON WRITING (2000). His insights on the craft are inspired, and I learned that he’d written most of his novels during the 80s in a drug and alcohol fueled frenzy. NEEDFUL THINGS (1991) was the first novel that King wrote while sober. So I gave King’s writing another chance. I think King is an absolute master of the short story form. His ability to depict small-town suburban life is on par with the great John Cheever, who is considered “the Chekov of the suburbs.” I’m also amazed by King’s impeccable skill at world building. “All things serve the Beam,” and so many of King’s novels tie back to Roland’s world and the Dark Tower. However, I still think King struggles with writing with a sensitivity to his female characters, and, as evidence by the controversial child orgy scene in IT, he is almost entirely tone-deaf on the subject of child sexual abuse. However, where King has been guilty of using sexual abuse as a plot point or depicting child predators metaphorically, Flanagan and Howard made their adaptation of GERALD’S GAME almost entirely about Jessie (Carla Gugino) coming to terms with the abuse she had experienced from her father during an eclipse.
On the surface, GERALD’S GAME is a movie about a married couple who go to a remote cabin in order to rekindle their sex life. Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) has become uninterested in any sex that doesn’t include violence against his wife. Once Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the bed, he subsequently has a heart attack and dies, leaving her completely trapped with zero hope of anyone coming to help. Once a dog enters and starts eating Gerald’s corpse, Jessie has a psychotic break, and the rest of her interactions for most of the movie are with figments of her imagination—a sinister and condescending version of her dead husband and a stronger, more determined version of herself. As Jessie continues to interact with these two iterations of herself, she flashes back to a childhood memory of her father’s abuse and the most disgusting mind game I’ve ever seen to get her to agree to be silent about it.
I didn’t find the movie to be particularly scary, but it was definitely tense. There are gory scenes, and obviously ones that are uncomfortable and potentially triggering to watch. But it was really the outstanding performances by Gugino and Chiara Aurelia, who plays the younger version of Jessie, that kept me watching and captivated throughout the movie. However, by the time the film reached what I thought was the end, everything beyond that just dragged. The epilogue provides a cathartic ending, but it felt like I had to slough too far to get there.
For the most part, I think GERALD’S GAME is a good film adaptation. And perhaps the 2017 remake of IT set my expectation too high for what an adapted King novel can be. If you already have a Netflix account, definitely give this a click. There are over 20 King adaptations either in talks or in the works. If they are at least as good as GERALD’S GAME, we should be excited for this Renaissance of Stephen King’s work. The next on slate is a cinematic release of King’s novella 1922, which will hit theaters October 20. So far the film has some decent word of mouth coming out of the festival circuit, so there is plenty to be excited about.
Take care,
Xiola Bleu
