Gerald’s Game is a 2017 American psychological horror film directed and edited by Mike Flanagan, from a screenplay by Flanagan and Jeff Howard. It is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Stephen King, which was long considered unfilmable. The film stars Carla Gugino and Bruce Greenwood as a married couple who go to an isolated house for a vacation.
When the husband dies of a sudden heart attack, the wife, handcuffed to the bed without a key and with little hope of rescue, must find a way to survive while battling her own demons. Jessie and Gerald Burlingame go to a remote lake house in Fairhope, Alabama, for a romantic getaway. While Gerald takes Viagra, Jessie offers a raw steak to a stray dog before her husband leads her into the bedroom, leaving the door open. Hoping to mend their relationship, she changes into a new pair of panties and he handcuffs her to the bedpost to act out a rape fantasy. She quickly tells him to stop, leading to a heated argument, and Gerald suddenly dies of a heart attack, leaving Jessie handcuffed.
As time passes, the dog enters the house, eating pieces of Gerald’s body. Hallucinations of Gerald taunt Jessie impotently about their strained marriage and his erectile dysfunction. Dehydrated and tired, Jessie also hallucinates a more confident version of herself, who explains things about her and Gerald that she has never had the courage to admit. This hallucination reminds her of the glass of water Gerald keeps on the shelf above the bed, and she reaches for it, rolling a bill from her nightgown into a straw.
Night falls, and a disfigured figure with a bag of human bones and jewelry briefly appears in the bedroom. Gerald assumes that this “Moonlight Man” is the Grim Reaper waiting to claim Jessie, but the dog’s reaction and bloody footprints leave her unsure whether he is another hallucination. Gerald calls Jessie “Mouse”, a nickname given to her by her father, which evokes memories of a family vacation during a solar eclipse: when Jessie was twelve and alone, her father coaxed her to sit on his lap, masturbate while she watched the eclipse, and then manipulated her into pretending the attack never happened.
Forced to accept that she is continuing the cycle of repressed trauma from her unhappy marriage, Jessie dreams of the Moonlight Man licking her feet. She awakens to find it is the hungry dog, which Gerald points out will soon try to eat her. He explains how long it will take to find her body, and warns that the Moonlight Man will return for her after dark. In the dream, Jessie confronts her younger self, who cut her hand shortly after the attack.
Determined to escape, Jessie smashes a glass of water and cuts her wrist, lubricating it with her own blood and removing her gloves to escape. She reaches for the handcuff keys, unlocks her other hand, and bandages her wrist with a sanitary pad, but passes out. Waking up in the dark next to Gerald’s mutilated corpse, Jessie confronts the Moonlight Man in a delirious state and offers him her wedding ring in exchange for his bag of jewelry. She drives away, but hallucinates about a solar eclipse and the Moonlight Man in the back seat; he whispers “Mouse” in her ear, and she crashes the car, but is saved by a neighbor.
Six months later, Jessie writes a letter to her twelve-year-old self. Using Gerald’s life insurance money to set up a fund to support victims of sexual abuse, she is haunted by visions of the Moonlight Man at night, and worries that the police did not find her ring when they searched the lake house. News reports reveal that the Moonlight Man is actually Raymond Andrew Joubert, a pedophilic grave robber and acromegalic serial killer who is eventually caught; he mutilates Gerald’s body for a grisly trophy collection, but spares Jessie.
Jessie arrives at the courthouse just as Joubert is being arraigned. He uncuffs her and taunts her, saying, “You’re not real, you’re just moonlight.” Seeing Gerald and her father in the crowd, Jessie tells him, “You’re much smaller than I remember,” and leaves in triumph.
