Synopsis
Some games you play. Some you survive.
When her husband's sex game goes wrong, Jessie (who is handcuffed to a bed in a remote lake house) faces warped visions, dark secrets and a dire choice.
2017 Directed by Mike Flanagan
When her husband's sex game goes wrong, Jessie (who is handcuffed to a bed in a remote lake house) faces warped visions, dark secrets and a dire choice.
Carla Gugino Bruce Greenwood Henry Thomas Chiara Aurelia Kate Siegel Carel Struycken Adalyn Jones Bryce Harper Gwendolyn Mulamba Jamie Flanagan Dori Lumpkin Natalie Roers Nikia Reynolds Bill Riales Chuck Borden Mike McGill Charles Dube Kimberly Battista Jon Arthur John Ceallach Tony Beard Tom Glynn Stu Cookson Ben Pronsky Joseph Chadwick Kinney Charles Adams Michael Amstutz Clint Edwards Robert Gill Show All…
Geralds Game - Stephen King, Игра Джеральда, Geralds farlige leg, Jogo Perigoso, El juego de Gerald, Jessie, Gra Geralda, Geralds lek, Играта на Джералд, Oyun, Das Spiel, Il gioco di Gerald, Julma leikki, 杰罗德游戏, Игра Джералда, המשחקים של ג'ראלד, 제럴드의 게임, Jocul lui Gerald, Bilincsben, Geralds Lek, Geralds Game, Гра Джеральда, 傑羅德遊戲, เกมกระตุกขวัญ, Trò Chơi Kinh Hoàng, ジェラルドのゲーム
The first hour of this is SO good.
The last ten minutes are SO bad.
In that sense, it may be the most faithful King adaptation ever.
Plays now more than the book did as a necessary exercise in our collective responsibility towards victims of trauma, and Flanagan is such a tight craftsman that the whole thing has the icky film of exploitation all over it, especially in the flashbacks. Shame he stuck with the source material's terrible coda, but the notorious finale is just as gross and awesome as you imagined when translated to the screen.
This really went from straight porn gone wrong-to 127 hours-to a family drama-to a ghost story-to some Jeffrey Dahmer shit-to a uplifting female conclusion...and I honestly loved every second.
Perhaps the quintessential King adaptation, owning the author's problematic worldview, inability to stick the landing, and guttural dialogue/character work. But it transforms the fetishistic potboiler into a yarn about confronting one's historical abusers, and embracing their pain. Wonderful stuff Flanagan should be so, so proud of.
Quite easily the best of the 2017 Stephen King adaptations. The hallucinatory nature of his supernatural genre metaphor storytelling here is stripped down into something classical and thriller-y, Flanagan's textural use of space and lighting grounding the psychological elements of this within a sticky exploitation scenario, before revealing them to be a pretense for the ways in which trauma physically manifests and abuse is historically perpetuated and ignored. The overwhelming nature of abuse can make it seem otherworldly and undefeatable, so Flanagan instead works to make it tangible, fallible and pathetic, which is why the (seemingly) universal dismissal of the film's coda is so baffling to me. When I first read it I found it a bit strange but fun…