Summary

• Gerald's Game surprises with multiple genres — supernatural chiller, drama, torture horror — and a jaw-dropping ending.
• Mike Flanagan's nuanced horror adaptation earns critical acclaim for exploring trauma.
• Jessie's journey in Gerald's Game involves rediscovery, coming to with the past, morally defeating Joubert.

Netflix's Gerald's Game is a Stephen King movie that many fans felt was unfilmable, especially because of the shocking Gerald's Game ending. However, frequent King collaborator Mike Flanagan found a way to make the story into a film. Based on King's 1992 novel of the same name, on the surface, it's a bit different King's usual Maine-set horror fare. In Gerald's Game, Jessie (Carla Gugino) ends up stuck handcuffed to a bed in a remote house after her husband Gerald (Bruce Greenwood) dies of a heart attack mid-way through a bid to spice up their sex life.

What follows is her desperate attempts to survive and escape, but also a regression into her psyche, with cinematically-minded visions of herself, her husband, and her traumatic past coming to light. As a 12-year-old, Jessie was sexually abused by her father during a solar eclipse and later tricked into guilty silence, something that unsurprisingly influenced the rest of her life. This isn't just about escaping metal confines — it's about escaping the mind as well. Gerald's Game ties itself up with a cautiously happy ending but with a jaw-dropping twist.

What Happens In The Gerald's Game Ending?

Jessie Escapes & Survives The Ordeal

After having an epiphany following a vision of her younger self, Jessie slits her wrists and uses the lubrication of the blood to escape her handcuffs in Gerald's Game's goriest scene. She crashes her car, escaping the house — with a few more visions along the way — and is eventually rescued by a nearby couple. As outlined in her letter to her younger self, following all this, the expected happened: she was taken to a hospital and questioned by police but lied and said she didn't any of the horrors experienced in the house.

It was determined Gerald died of a heart attack, not her pushing him off the bed. and afterward, his company covered up the sexual elements of the case; essentially, the truth was repressed. Jessie got several skin grafts for her mangled hand and used the life insurance payout to start a foundation to help victims of child abuse, channeling her self-imagined torture while tied to the bed into something practical and helpful.

The Real Meaning Of The Gerald's Game Ending

Jessie Had To Overcome Repressed Childhood Trauma To Survive

For all its physical horrors, Jessie's journey is one of rediscovery and acceptance. She's been repressing what her father did to her — both the sexual abuse itself and his victim-complex cover-up — since she was a child, never truly able to it it to even those she allegedly trusts. But she's also been fighting to avoid addressing the problems with her marriage (she objects to Gerald calling himself "Daddy" during sex); Gerald is quite evidently a father substitute, and on a more base level, she's been hiding the true nature of their fractured relationship from herself for years.

Everything is framed to hinge on the moment of the eclipse.

Across the film, all of these thoughts slowly come to the forefront thanks to the creeping visions, the solitude, and the encroaching possibility of death forcing her to face the past. Everything is framed to hinge on the moment of the eclipse — sitting on her father's lap was when innocence was lost — with visions hued in its highly saturated red glow. This is the ground zero of her broken mental state.

The Gerald's Game's ending is thus unflinchingly about addressing and learning from the past. Jessie only escapes by ing cutting herself accidentally on a glass in the aftermath of the eclipse, and her new life after the handcuffs is built on her using everything to power herself forward — getting past it but also using it. To hammer this home, the film has her address the letter to Mouse (her younger self, retroactively providing the pre-teen hope) and the final shot even shows the 2017 eclipse ending.

Raymond Andrew Joubert Explained

Jessie Learns The Serial Killer Was Real

While most of what Jessie experiences is in her mind, the final minutes reveal something much more dangerous. Overnight, while tied to the bed, Jessie is visited by a tall, disproportioned figure. He stands silently in the corner with a bag full of bones and personal items, moving slowly towards her every time she looks away like a night terror she can't awake from. Most of his "backstory" comes from self-suggestion in Jessie's mind.

Twin Peaks actor Carel Struycken plays the Moonlight Man, Raymond Andrew Joubert in Gerald's Game.

While trying to rationalize the Moonlight Man as a trick of the light (or moonbeams) she begins to view him as an embodiment of death. Within this, there is a lurking suggestion there really is something physical here — the dog slowly feasting on Gerald is spooked by his presence, and a bloodied footprint is left on the floor. This all comes to a head as she escapes and he's standing right at the end of the top-floor corridor. Slowly making her way past, she deposits her wedding ring in his bag of trinkets.

He's last seen in the body of the film in the back of the car, causing her to crash. Images of him continue to haunt Jessie after she's escaped, representing how coming to with her past and helping others hasn't fully freed her; in a chilling callback to something she thought to herself on the bed, the wedding ring she gave to the figure was never found. And the explanation really is terrifying.

The monster was actually Raymond Andrew Joubert, a very real necrophile-turned-serial killer who had acromegaly, leading to his extreme proportions. He started as a graveyard vandal in Alabama, stealing jewelry from recently buried corpses, then escalated, desecrating bodies and eventually stealing various parts of the anatomy — and at one point even "preserved" his family. Joubert came across Jessie seemingly by accident, taking body parts from Gerald (which she assumed to be the actions of the hungry dog). He was finally discovered when he murdered someone and was caught mid-act.

While the twist obviously shows that Joubert was real, there are evidently moments where it all was in Jessie's head; he didn't sneak into her apartment every night. Anytime Joubert appears in the red light of the eclipse or with supernaturally bright eyes, this is safely in Jessie's head; her mind's taken his image and is using it as an emblem of her fear. The other case where it's an imaginary killer is when Jessie talks with Gerald about him being under the bed — the hand reaching up has to be in her mind. Everything else, however, appears to be real.

When Jessie confronts him at his arraignment, however, they share a strange connection.

It's initially unclear why Joubert spared Jessie. In the letter, she presumes it's because he was reported to favor male victims when it came to mutilation, which in the context of his stalking is all the more unsettling. When Jessie confronts him at his arraignment, however, they share a strange connection; upon seeing her, he breaks out of his handcuffs and says, "You're not real, you're only made of moonlight" — exactly what she thought he was.

Ostensibly this suggests that Joubert didn't kill Jessie because he didn't know there was anything to kill. But the final line — "You're so much smaller than I " — brings the story right back to the true focus: Jessie is free. Gerald's Game is a movie exploring how the journey, no matter how torturous, shapes you; and so the ending isn't just cathartic for the character; it's a message of hope for everyone.

How The Gerald's Game Ending Compares To Stephen King's Book

Jessie's Escape & The Courtroom Scene Were Faithful To The Novel

There are significant differences between Stephen King's Gerald's Game novel and the movie. This is always the case with King movies, as the author uses a lot of internalization in his stories. Plus, with Gerald's Game, it is impossible to adapt it as a faithful movie since it all takes place with Jessie alone and handcuffed to the bed. Everything in the movie after Gerald's death is her thinking about her life and past trauma. However, on top of adding scenes that were not in the book to make the story cinematically appealing, other changes were made.

Gerald's death was different in the movie. He was truly a bad man in the book, as he planned to sexually assault his wife, and Jessie kills him in self-defense. There were also changes made to the end of the story, as Jessie didn't write the letter to her younger self in the book. Instead, she wrote it to Ruth Neary, who was Jessie's college roommate. There was also a connection in the book to Dolores Claiborne since the eclipse was the same one in both novels. However, the escape was faithful to the novel, as is the courtroom scene.

How The Gerald's Game Ending Was Received

The Stephen King Movie Is Certified Fresh

Critics loved Gerald's Game, as it is one of the few Stephen King adaptations that was certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a 91%. The audience score was not as high, but was still a Fresh 70% positive score. However, when it comes to Gerald's Game ending, not all audience liked how it all wrapped up. One reviewer wrote, "it all tied together with her escape super well. But after she escaped is when the movie took a nosedive," as they didn't like the Joubert revelation.

But on the critical side, even the negative reviews seemed to love the ending. In his review for Entertainment Weekly, film critic Darren Franich wrote the finale "is also one of the single grossest things I’ve ever seen in a movie. It would almost be worth the price of issions; it’s certainly worth a Netflix click. But that build takes a long time." However, the positive reviews outnumber the negative by a great deal. In his positive review for IndieWire, Eric Kohn wrote that Flanagan paid tribute to King in the finale:

"Gerald’s Game is King by the book. So when the movie arrives at a phenomenal, breakneck climax, and then keeps going with a totally implausible twist, it’s adhering to the unwritten rule: No matter who’s driving, everyone must bow to the King."

In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, film critic Andy Crump hailed Gerald's Game as Mike Flanagan's breakout. "Flanagan’s sense of clemency comes to the fore, spinning catharsis, healing and maybe even the hope of a happy end for Jessie. (After what she experiences in the film, she deserve one.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film is his most accomplished to date, the result of the years he’s spent giving a damn about his characters and their anguish. He’s so good at it, he even makes it look easy."