Gerald's Game: Netflix Adaptation vs. the Novel
2026-10-22
This post contains Amazon affiliate links; we may earn a commission from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
Spoilers follow for both the 1992 novel and the 2017 Netflix film, including the endings.
Stephen King's Gerald's Game spent a quarter century on the "unfilmable Stephen King novel" list, and for good reason — nearly the entire book takes place inside one woman's head while her body is handcuffed to a bed in an empty lake house. When Mike Flanagan finally adapted it for Netflix in 2017, he had to solve a structural problem the novel never has to: how do you dramatize 300-plus pages of internal monologue without just filming someone lying still and thinking? His answer changes how the story unfolds almost scene to scene, even though the plot beats land in mostly the same places.
The setup is identical in both versions
Jessie Burlingame and her husband Gerald drive to their remote lake house in western Maine for a weekend getaway. Gerald, hoping to spice up a marriage that's gone cold, has brought a pair of handcuffs and wants to act out a rape fantasy — cuffing Jessie to the bedposts while he, essentially, ignores her. Jessie goes along with it at first, then changes her mind and tells him to stop. Gerald, aroused and annoyed, doesn't listen. Jessie kicks him hard enough to knock him backward, and Gerald — out of shape and overexcited — has a heart attack and dies on the bedroom floor, leaving Jessie handcuffed to the bed with no phone, no spare key, and nobody expected to check on the house for days. Both the novel and the film open this way, almost shot for shot, scene for scene. The divergence starts immediately after.
The book's trick: everyone in the room is Jessie
In King's novel, Jessie spends the bulk of the story arguing with herself. Deprived of food, water, and sleep, her mind splits into competing internal voices — including a composed, practical version of herself she nicknames "Goodwife Burlingame" and a sharper, angrier voice modeled on a college friend, Ruth Neary, who years earlier had tried to get Jessie to confront a buried memory about her father. These voices bicker, strategize, and eventually drag the truth of Jessie's childhood — including what happened to her, alone with her father, during a 1963 solar eclipse — up to the surface. Gerald himself is present only as a corpse; once he dies early in the story, he doesn't talk back. A loose dog gets into the house and begins eating Gerald's body in front of Jessie, in one of the novel's most notorious passages.
The film's trick: Gerald gets a speaking role again
Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard solved the "can't film a monologue" problem by putting those internal voices into actual bodies the camera can show. In the Netflix film, Carla Gugino's Jessie talks out loud to a hallucinated version of Gerald (Bruce Greenwood), who stays very much "alive" and conversational throughout the ordeal, taunting and goading her the way the real man might have. A second hallucination — a tougher, more assertive version of Jessie herself — also appears to argue with her, standing in for the internal voice the book gives her through the Ruth Neary-inflected self-talk. It's a clean solution: instead of narration, the film gets two characters in a room having the argument Jessie is having with herself, which plays visually instead of internally. The dog is still there, and it's still unsettling, but the film trims some of the novel's more graphic lingering on it.
The Moonlight Man, in both versions
Late in her ordeal, Jessie becomes convinced a figure is visiting her bedroom at night — an impossibly tall, pale, misshapen man she decides must be a hallucination, a delusion brought on by dehydration and terror. Both the book and the film play this the same way for most of the story: as a ghost story beat the audience, like Jessie, assumes isn't real. Both versions also pull off the same gut-punch reveal — he's real. The figure is Raymond Andrew Joubert, a necrophiliac grave robber (and, it's implied, serial killer) who had been using the house's seclusion to let himself in undetected. He's played by Carel Struycken (best known as Lurch from The Addams Family films) in the Netflix adaptation, whose sheer height does most of the work the novel's prose does on the page.
A direct tie to Dolores Claiborne
King wrote Gerald's Game as a loose companion piece to Dolores Claiborne, published the same year. Both novels center on women in crisis tied to the same 1963 solar eclipse in Maine — Jessie's abuse happens that day, and so does the climax of Dolores's own story, in which she kills her abusive husband. The books briefly cross over: in one of Jessie's visions, she perceives Dolores on the far side of the lake going through her own ordeal. It's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it connection in the prose, and the Netflix film keeps a nod to it but necessarily loses the texture, since Dolores Claiborne has its own separate 1995 film (starring Kathy Bates) that doesn't reference Gerald's Game at all.
How Jessie actually escapes
The escape sequence is one of the few scenes where book and film line up almost exactly, because it's inherently visual and King already wrote it as a set piece. Jessie breaks a water glass near the bed, then deliberately cuts a long gash into the back of her own hand so the blood acts as a lubricant, letting her slide her hand's narrower bones through the cuff. She frees herself, drags the bed toward the bathroom to find pain medication and eventually a way out, and manages to get help before she bleeds out completely. The film stages it as graphically as the book describes it — Flanagan didn't soften this scene for Netflix, and it remains one of the most talked-about moments in either version.
Where the ending actually splits: the courtroom scene
Both the novel and the film end with Jessie, months later, confronting Joubert in person at a courtroom hearing — this isn't a film invention, though it's staged very differently. In King's book, Jessie approaches Joubert, who mockingly references the "made of moonlight" delusion she'd once believed in, and she responds by spitting in his face — a blunt, physical release of everything she couldn't do to him in the bedroom. The film replaces that beat with a quieter, more pointed line: Gugino's Jessie looks at Joubert and tells him, "You're so much smaller than I remember," before walking away. Flanagan has said in interviews that the line is also a deliberate callback to the very first line the film's young Jessie speaks in an earlier flashback, tying the character's arc together in a way the novel's version doesn't attempt. It's a small change on paper but a real shift in tone — the book goes for catharsis through defiance, the film goes for catharsis through diminishment, literally making her tormentor feel smaller than her fear of him ever was.
What the film trims from the book's final chapters
The novel's last section is epistolary: Jessie writes a long letter to Ruth Neary, the estranged college friend whose voice had been arguing with her in her head throughout the ordeal, apologizing for pushing her away years earlier and laying out everything that happened, including the abuse she'd buried since childhood. It's a quiet, reflective close that gives the book room to spell out what the ordeal changed in Jessie's life. The film, constrained by runtime, compresses most of that reflection into voiceover and the courtroom scene itself rather than a separate epistolary coda — a necessary compression, not a contradiction of the book's point.
Other changes worth knowing about
A few smaller updates separate the 1992 setting from the 2017 one. The most obvious is cell phones — King's Jessie is stranded specifically because no landline exists within reach, a problem that gets harder to sell the further you get from 1992, so the filmmakers simply kept the house remote enough that it isn't an issue. The film also adds a Viagra subplot explaining Gerald's state of mind that isn't in the original novel, a choice co-writer Jeff Howard has said was meant to update the book's dynamics around Gerald's behavior without changing who he is or what he does.
Which version should you experience first?
The film is the more accessible entry point, and a genuinely strong adaptation of material that looked impossible to put on screen — Gugino's performance, doing the heavy lifting of essentially a one-woman show for most of its runtime, is the best reason to watch it. But the novel is worth reading regardless of which you see first, because King's version of Jessie's internal voice — written as prose rather than performed as dialogue — has a different, more claustrophobic texture that no film adaptation, however good, can fully replicate. If you want more on the eclipse-day connection between this book and its companion novel, Dolores Claiborne is the one to read next; and if book-to-screen changes like these are your thing, our breakdowns of how Pet Sematary's 2019 remake changed the novel and The Mist's very different book and movie endings cover similar ground elsewhere in King's catalog.