Jessie and Gerald are a couple having a spot of bother, so they do what any really wealthy people with relationship troubles do - scarper off to the countryside for a dirty weekend. Gerald has plans he hasn’t shared though - this is where the misery begins.
Spoilers ahead.
Gerald’s game, it transpires, is to handcuff Jessie to the bed. He hasn’t actually asked her about this beforehand which doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in his understanding of how to repair a relationship that’s trying to navigate some rocks in a shallow channel, but all that doesn’t really matter because Gerald pops a little blue pill that doesn’t agree with him. He has a heart attack, falls off the bed and Jessie is left trapped there, miles from anywhere with nobody about but a stray dog that is rather hungry and not too particular about societal views of dogs that eat people.
Based on a Stephen King book, this - according to the internet - was largely considered unfilmable, largely due to the fact that much of the book takes place in Jessie’s head. I posit instead that, when anybody says that something is unfilmable, what they are actually saying is that they struggle to imagine a way in which it could be filmed. Mike Flanagan, it turns out, is the perfect director for this kind of horror - he is a big fan of having people talk, after all. Jessie’s hallucinations and the journeys she takes through her memories involve her talking to various incarnations of herself, all expertly acted by Carla Gugino, and the occasional interaction with the ghost of Gerald, played by another Flanagan regular, Bruce Greenwood. There’s a lot of creeping dread in the film, and a lot of unease, that never really ascends to full blown supernatural or gory horror (except for how Jessie gets out of the handcuffs, a part of the book that has lived rent free in my head since I read it in my teens, and will likely now never leave.)
This means that all the heavy lifting is done by just two actors and the film succeeds admirably in this regard. Where it probably falters is in the present day subplot and the coda that reveals just exactly what one of Jessie’s visions was. To be fair, I think this is the clunkiest part of the book too - it might be a much better film without this at all, or perhaps a version of these visions where Jessie plays less of a part; the weakest element being her narration. This feels off somehow, since the audience have spent so much time with her in dialogue with both herself and her memories of others.
Overall, a good film, not a great one - good enough to get a little bit of an autumn scare going.