The most shocking moment of Gerald’s Game – the 2017 Stephen King horror adaptation that isn’t about a scary clown – wasn’t when heroine Jessie (Carla Gugino) realised her husband’s (Bruce Greenwood’s) heart attack had left her handcuffed to a bed in the middle of nowhere. Nor was it the vivid flashback to Jessie’s childhood trauma. Even the film’s gory, stomach-turning ‘degloving’ scene – which, for the record, I had to watch through my fingers – wasn’t what shocked me the most.
It was a small detail that had me reeling. You see, given that Gerald’s Game is a “Netflix Original”, I saw it at home. And since I was watching at home, I was distracted. Glancing at my phone, fiddling with some paperwork – you know the drill. So, when a fly buzzed across the screen and landed upon the haunting face of Greenwood (a posthumous apparition of the man, produced by Jessie’s delirium), I thought nothing of it. Our house was open, insects are to be expected. But then Greenwood casually sucked the fly into his mouth and I had to stop and rewind the damn movie to figure out what was going on. I was genuinely disoriented by seeing something that seemed impossible.
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