Gerald's Game

GERALD’S GAME (Mike Flanagan, 2017)

With declining intimacy in their marriage in GERALD’S GAME, Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) go to an isolated lake house to spice up their relationship. She agrees to entertain his sexual wishes and consents to being handcuffed to the bed, but Jessie draws the line when he wants to play out a rape fantasy. Whether brought on by anger or something else, Gerald has a heart attack, collapses, and falls onto the floor when Jessie pushes him off of her. While her husband’s lack of movement and blood pooling around him is highly worrying, Jessie has a more pressing concern. She is shackled to the bed, cannot get free, and has no one nearby to hear her cries for help.

This desperate situation becomes more fraught when a hungry stray dog wanders into the bedroom. Seeking an escape of any kind, Jessie flees into her mind where she strategizes with herself, is taunted by her husband, remembers a painful child incident with her father (Henry Thomas), and avoids looking in the corner where she saw the death-like Moonlight Man (Carel Struycken).

The filmography of GERALD’S GAME director and co-writer Mike Flanagan reveals an aptitude for spinning psychological horror out of action largely confined to a house. Whether focusing on the brother and sister trying to capture evidence of an evil mirror in OCULUS or a deaf writer in the woods attempting to fend off a masked killer outside her home in HUSH, Flanagan demonstrates a knack for using location limitations to wring out the tension. The houses in these films don’t need to be inherently scary if they harbor an unhappy family history, expose vulnerabilities, or isolate, as in GERALD’S GAME. Although a dog licking its chops and the embodiment of death appear, the mind’s assessment of danger, coupled with its difficulty to produce a solution, generate the terror.

GERALD’S GAME shows that as a mental protection strategy, compartmentalization can be useful. Jessie bottles up her anxiety as best she can because it will help her survive. She summons strength by breaking things down into manageable bits and blocking out the rest as much as possible. Gugino’s performance relies on conveying an active mind scanning Jessie’s options for a solution. The character is bound and vulnerable, but Gugino displays the toughness and ingenuity that identify how constraints don’t have to make one weak.

The primary horror in this Stephen King adaptation is psychological. Flanagan expertly sets up the situation with a highly tense sequence that draws immediate identification with Jessie. While GERALD’S GAME pokes at mental discomfort, the director allows for one excellent gross-out moment that ought to provoke plenty of seat-squirming even if this film is only available to see on the smaller screens at home. In the film’s end Flanagan unnecessarily literalizes points, yet it’s hard to be too critical for the nice notes he plays regarding overcoming trauma.

Grade: B

Ouija: Origin of Evil

OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL (Mike Flanagan, 2016)

With the help of her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso), a high school sophomore, and nine-year-old Doris (Lulu Wilson), Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) makes a living in 1967 as a fortune teller out of their Los Angeles home in OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL. Alice doesn’t have a gift that allows her to commune with the dead but views what she does as a different form of counseling for those who need it. To add some variety to her sessions, she purchases a Ouija board.

Alice’s husband was killed by a drunk driver, and she and the girls are still in pain because of his absence. One night Doris uses the Ouija board to attempt to contact her father. She seems to succeed, as well as being able to see and communicate with other spirits that may be less friendly. Doris’ facility with the Ouija board leads Alice to think that her daughter has the supernatural gift that she does not. Lina becomes increasingly troubled by Doris’ behavior. When she finds pages of notes her sister wrote in Polish, she takes them to their school principal, Father Tom Hogan (Henry Thomas), in the hope that they can be translated. What he learns is not reassuring.

OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL is a prequel to the so-so 2014 horror film OUIJA, although knowledge of its predecessor is unnecessary. The board game instigates the action but does not play a major role. Ultimately this is all just an excuse for Hasbro to try to sell some toys. Still, director and co-writer Mike Flanagan incorporates the board effectively, especially when showing the view through the planchette. As the camera peers through it, the limited perspective in a dark room heightens the feeling of vulnerability.

Flanagan picks his spots to show the malevolent forces threatening the Zanders’ well-being. He recognizes that the power of suggestion can often be as scary or more frightening than what can be seen. The board itself is not a fearsome object, yet the evil energy mentally invested in it something taboo charges its appearance on screen. OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL’s most disturbing scene is a conversation Doris has with a boy interested in Lina. The little girl describes in great detail what the sensation of being strangled is like. The unsettling nature of what she is saying exists only in the mind, yet it conjures such strong feelings and images. When a character reaches inside a hole in the wall or crawls through a tight duct, the empathetic impulse that puts the viewer in that person’s place injects tension simply from imagining what it would be like.

OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL puts a nice twist on fear of old things through its period setting and form as a film. Flanagan adds reel change markers and slight warps on the soundtrack when they take effect, adding a little raggedness and sense of unpredictability to the digital file being watched. Again, it’s working toward creating a state of mind that anything could happen, often for the worst.

Grade: B