Gerald's Game Film Analysis

In “Gerald’s Game,” the central character Jessie Burlingame (Carla Gugino), and her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) arrived at a remote lake house in Alabama for a romantic getaway. They encountered a stray dog on their way to the lakehouse. Afterwards, Jessie calls out to the stray dog whom she saw earlier and fed him raw meat. When re-entering the house, she leaves the front door open. In an attempt to save their strained marriage, and rekindle their sex life, Gerald suggests that he should handcuff Jessie onto the bed. She reluctantly agrees, and he proceeds to take a viagra tablet. While she was chained to the bedframe post, Gerald begins to try to spice up their love life, but she became uncomfortable with his violent fantasy. Suddenly, Gerald has a heart-attack mid-way through a heated argument with her. He dies, and his body falls off the bed, leaving Jessie locked in the handcuffs. Jessie becomes desperate to survive and escape, but also starts to hallucinate. What follows in Jessie’s hallucination is cinematically visions of herself, her husband, and her traumatic past of her sexually abused by her father.

The three scenes that I choose from the film …show more content…
“Genre films explore aspects of the actual world in imaginative ways, magnifying certain conflicts and intensifying various emotions.”(Nicholas, 2010). The type of genre “Gerald’s Game” posits is horror, as “fear, suspense, horror, shock, surprise, disgust, repulsion, [and] relief” (Nichols, 2010) are all shown within the film. “Gerald’s Game” is an example of horror film with such profound psychological and emotional scope. The disgust of horror was shown at the end of the film. It presents how Jessie extricates herself from the handcuffs by breaking a glass cup and cutting parts of her wrists. Another disgusting aspect of the film is shown when the stray dog starts tearing off the skin of Geralds' arm to