Major spoilers for Gerald's Game.

Gerald's Game, Netflix's new Stephen King movie, is a very unexpected film. Starting as a simple sex-gone-wrong thriller, it turns into supernatural chiller, repressed-memory drama, torture porn horror - and that's before we even get to the jaw-dropping ending.

Based on King's 1992 novel of the same name, on the surface it's a bit different to what you expect from the writer. There's no Maine setting, no child with fantastical powers, no overly sadistic bullies - not even a struggling writer recovering from addiction trying to work through their block. And yet what it does have is a complex, human story underpinning the horror-inflected plot. Pair that with horror maestro Mike Flanagan as director and a far-reaching central performance by Caral Gugino and you've got one of his best movie adaptations.

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In Gerald's Game, we follow Jessie (Gugino), who is stuck handcuffed to a bed in a remote house after her husband (Bruce Greenwood) has a heart attack mid-way through a bid to spice up their sex life. What follows is her desperate attempts to survive and escape, but also a regression into her mind, with cinematically-minded visions of herself, her husband and her traumatic past coming to light; as it goes, we learn as a twelve-year-old Jessie was, during an eclipse, sexually abused by her father and later tricked into guilty silence, something that unsurprisingly influenced the rest of her life. This isn't just about escaping metal confines - it's about escaping the mind as well.

But what about that ending? Gerald's Game ties itself up with a cautiously happy endnote but does so with a pretty shocking twist and rather dark case of coming to terms with the past.

What Happens To Jessie After Escaping?

Carla Gugino in Gerald's Game

After having an epiphany care of a vision of her younger self, Jessie slits her wrists and uses the lubrication of the blood to escape her handcuffs. She crashes her car escaping the house - with a few more visions along the way - and is eventually rescued by a nearby couple.

So, to the ending. As outlined in her letter to her younger self, following all this, the expected happened - she was taken to a hospital and questioned by police but lied and said she didn't remember any of the horrors experienced in the house. Not that it mattered much - it was determined Gerald died of a heart attack, not her pushing him off the bed - and afterward, his company covered up the sexual elements of the case; essentially, the truth was repressed. Jessie got several skin-grafts for her mangled hand and used the life insurance payout to start a foundation to help victims of child abuse, channeling her self-imagined torture while tied to the bed into something practical and helpful.

Physical horrors aside, Jessie's journey is one of rediscovery and acceptance. She's been repressing what he father did to her - both the sexual abuse itself and his victim-complex cover-up - since she was a child, always knowing it (she objects to Gerald calling himself "Daddy" during sex) yet never truly able to admit it to even those she allegedly trusts. But she's also been fighting to avoid addressing the problems with her marriage; the much older lawyer Gerald is quite evidently a father substitute, and on a more base level she's been hiding the true nature of their fractured relationship from herself for years.

The Eclipse in Gerald's Game

Across the film, all of these thoughts slowly come to the forefront care of creeping visions, the solitude, and the encroaching possibility of death forcing her to face the past. Everything is framed to hinge on the moment of the eclipse - sat on her father's lap was when innocence was lost - with visions hued in its highly-saturated red glow. This is the ground zero of her broken mental state.

Gerald's Game's ending is thus unflinchingly about addressing and learning from the past. Jessie only escapes by remembering cutting herself accidentally on a glass in the aftermath of the eclipse, and her new life after the handcuffs is built on her using everything to power herself forward - getting past it but also using it. To hammer this home, the film has her address the letter to Mouse (her younger self, retroactively providing the pre-teen hope) and the final shot even shows the 2017 eclipse ending, a neat visual coda to the message.

Of course, there's another side to the story. While most of what Jessie experiences is in her mind, the final minutes reveal something much more skin-crawling.

Joubert in Gerald's Game

Raymond Andrew Joubert Explained

Overnight while tied to the bed, Jessie is visited by a tall, disproportioned figure (played by Carel Struycken, best known as Twin Peaks' giant). He stands silently in the corner with a bag full of bones and personal items, moving slowly towards her every time she looks away like a night terror she can't awake from. Most of his "backstory" comes from self-suggestion in Jessie's mind; while trying to rationalize him as a trick of the light (or moonbeams) she begins to view him as an embodiment of death. Within this, there is a lurking suggestion there really is something physical here - the dog slowly feasting on Gerald is spooked by his presence and a bloodied footprint is left on the floor. This all comes to a head as she escapes and he's stood right at the end of the top floor corridor; slowly making her way past, she deposits her wedding ring in his bag of trinkets. He's last seen in the body of the film in the back of the car, causing her to crash.

Images of him continue to haunt Jessie after she's escaped, representing how coming to terms with her past and helping others hasn't fully freed her; in a chilling callback to something she thought to herself on the bed, the wedding ring she gave to the figure was never found. And the explanation really is terrifying.

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The monster was actually Raymond Andrew Joubert, a very real necrophile-turned-serial killer who suffered from acromegaly, leading to his extreme proportions. He started as a graveyard vandal in Alabama, stealing jewelry from recently buried corpses, then escalated, desecrating bodies and eventually stealing various parts of the anatomy - and at one point went full Ed Gein and "preserved" his family. Joubert came across Jessie seemingly by accident, taking body parts from Gerald (which she assumed to be the actions of the hungry dog). He was finally discovered when he moved to straight-up murder and was caught mid-act.

Jessie meets Joubert in Gerald's Game

While the twist obviously shows that Joubert was real, there's evidently moments where it all was in Jessie's head; he didn't sneak into her apartment every night. Shorthand, anytime Joubert appears in the red light of the eclipse or with supernaturally bright eyes, this is safely in Jessie's head; her mind's taken his image and is using it as an emblem of her fear. The other case where it's an imaginary killer is when Jessie talks with Gerald about him being under the bed - the hand reaching up has to be in her mind. Everything else, however, appears to be real.

It's initially unclear why he spared Jessie. In the letter, she presumes it's because he was reported to favor male victims when it came to mutilation, which in the context of his stalking is all the more unsettling. When she confronts him at his arraignment, however, we learn they may share a strange connection; upon seeing her, he breaks out of his handcuffs and says "you're not real, you're only made of moonlight" - exactly what she thought he was.

Ostensibly this suggests that Joubert didn't kill Jessie because he didn't know there was anything to kill - we already know of his skewed view on the world - but the similar wording connects the two greater. The ending is, of course, framed as Jessie's moral victory and there's no attempt at making Joubert sympathetic, yet them sharing the core line (one he may have picked up from her) makes clear that what we've discovered Jessie's experienced through her life is not an isolated incident. They're both suffering. The dog becomes symbolically important here as it having a collar yet no owner, then later feasting on the dead sees it share traits of both characters - everybody hurts.

But the final line - "you're so much smaller than I remember" - brings us right back to the true focus: Jessie is free. Gerald's Game is a movie exploring how the journey, no matter how torturous, shapes you; and so the ending isn't just cathartic for our character, it's a message of hope for everyone.

Next: Gerald’s Game Review

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