As that lady, Carla Gugino is spellbindingly terrific, doing a number of the greatest work of her profession. She inhabits the concern and gumption of Jessie, an individual who should acknowledge she’s going to die handcuffed to a mattress until she undoes the bodily shackles positioned on her by a husband (Bruce Greenwood) who then had a deadly coronary heart assault, in addition to the lifelong psychological shackles positioned on her by all the lads in her life: her newly late husband Gerald, her sinister and predatory father Tom (Henry Thomas)… and even the Moonlight Man.
Certainly, maybe essentially the most visceral picture within the movie outdoors of the blood splatter of Jessie’s escape from {the handcuffs}, is of the large shadow solid by seven-foot-tall actor Carel Struycken. Showing halfway by the movie as a seeming hallucination (no less than at first), Struycken’s anonymous customer enters the distant lake home the place Jessie and Gerald tried to get away for the weekend, showing like a wraith as unknowable as Loss of life himself. He additionally comes bearing a field wherein he collects the jewels, bones, and different paraphernalia of the just lately deceased. It’s a treasure chest that he implicitly needs Jessie to donate to.
A darkish and enigmatic determine whom Jessie nicknames “the Moonlight Man,” as a result of he solely seems when the complete moon is at its brightest through the witching hour, this leering countenance immerses Gerald’s Sport in a supernatural fog. There’s a cause that even six years after the movie’s launch, he’s nonetheless showing on social media as a form of meme’d superstar.
If solely his seeming unique symbolism within the movie stayed inside the nether area from whence he got here: that uncanny valley between sleeping and waking, nightmares and actuality, dying and life. But it’s not meant to be.
In what may be the perfect instance of King’s have to over-explain and rationalize so lots of his ambiguities, Gerald’s Sport on web page and display ends not with Jessie’s escape from her literal and metaphysical entice—or her succumbing to them. We undoubtedly see her commit ugly, but liberating, injury to herself as she rips the pores and skin from her hand to flee one of many handcuffs after which unlock the opposite; we additionally see her come head to head with the visage of her potential dying as on the hour of her liberation, the Moonlight Man returns and calls for a toll if she is to exit the home. So she bequeaths him the marriage ring she not wants; we even see how regardless of this providing the shadow of Loss of life lingers over her nonetheless with the Moonlight Man showing in her thoughts’s eye and bathed in crimson as she continues dropping a unprecedented quantity of blood in her automotive.
She survives all her traumas, fortunately, but the movie is unable to withstand King’s gilding of the lily. Therefore the movie concludes not solely with a denouement, however a long-winded voiceover wherein Jessie, whereas writing a letter to her imaginary youthful self, tidies the whole lot up with a neat bow, together with the Moonlight Man. Because it seems, he was neither a hallucination nor a manifestation of Loss of life; he was a necrophiliac-turned-serial-killer who simply occurred to endure from a situation that brought on him to develop right into a seeming big.