Gerald's Game

Jessie and Gerald Burlingame drive to their isolated lake house hoping the weekend will fix something between them. Gerald handcuffs Jessie to the headboard. She isn't comfortable with it and asks him to stop. They argue — and Gerald has a massive heart attack and falls dead off the bed. The key lands on the floor. The nearest neighbor is miles away. No one is coming.

A stray dog gets in through an open door and begins eating Gerald's body. Jessie can't stop it. Her mind starts to fracture: she hears voices — a version of herself, sharper and colder, talking her through options; a version of Gerald still arguing, still dismissive. They debate her chances. The odds are bad.

Flashbacks surface: during a solar eclipse when she was a girl, her father sexually abused her while the rest of the family stood outside watching the sky. She told no one. She has been arranging herself around that silence ever since.

At night, a tall, skeletal figure stands in the corner of the room. It watches her. She doesn't know if it's real. It comes back.

Jessie's escape requires a broken glass and an act of deliberate self-destruction — she uses her own blood as lubricant and pulls her hand through the cuff, degloving it entirely. She gets out of the house. She collapses on the driveway and is found.

The figure was real: Raymond Andrew Joubert, a drifter and necrophile who had been stealing bodies from cemeteries. He is caught. In the film's final scene, Jessie faces him in court and speaks directly to him — not asking for anything, not forgiving anything. Claiming what she survived as her own.