Jessie (Carla Gugino) and Gerald Burlingame (Bruce Greenwood) have rented an isolated lake house in Fairhope, Alabama, for a romantic getaway. Gerald prepares by taking Viagra and Jessie feeds a stray dog before they retire to the bedroom. They leave the door open. She changes into a new silk slip, and he handcuffs her to the bedposts. He has a heart-attack and drops dead, leaving her trapped, handcuffed to the bed. Hours pass and the dog enters the house and eats part of Gerald’s corpse. Jessie hallucinates about Gerld and their marital problems. She hallucinates a more aggressive version of herself, who explains things to her. She rolls the price tag of her slip into a straw and drinks from a glass of water on the shelf above.
Night falls and a deformed figure with a bag of bones appears in the bedroom. Gerald is there and says The Moonlight Man is Death, but Jessie refuses to believe. Gerald calls her “mouse” which was her father’s pet name for her, and she recalls a family vacation in which she (Chiara Aurelia) sat on her father’s (Henry Thomas) lap, and he masturbated. She dreams that the Moonlight Man licks her foot. She wakes up and it is the dog licking her. Gerald says the dog will eat her soon, after the Moonlight Man comes for her in the dark. She sees her childhood self, who cut her hand on a glass.
Jessie breaks the water glass and cuts her wrist, lubricating the cuff with her own blood, and slips her hand free. She grabs the handcuff key and bandages her wrist with feminine hygiene pads, but then she passes out. She wakes up in the dark beside Gerald’s mutilated corpse and gives her wedding ring to the Moonlight Man for his collection of trinkets. She makes it to the car, drives away, but hallucinates the Moonlight Man in the backseat. He calls her “Mouse,” and she crashes the car but is rescued by neighbours.
Six months later, she writes a letter to her 12-year-old self. She uses Herald’s life insurance to create a foundation for victims of sexual abuse. Still, she is haunted by visions of the Moonlight Man, who turns out to be Andrew Joubert, a necrophiliac grave robber and serial killer with acromegaly. It was he who mutilated Gerald’s corpse. She testifies at his trial, and he says, “You’re not real. You’re only made of moonlight.” He looks like her father, and she tells him, “You’re so much smaller than I remember.”
The film was directed and edited by Mike Flanagan from a screenplay by him and Jeff Howard, based on Stephen King’s 1992 novel. It is a psychological horror thriller released by Netflix to very positive reviews from critics, receiving 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. Stephen King himself called the film hypnotic, horrifying, and terrific. I’d say so, yeah. Carla Gugino carried the film and did a great job of it. Much of it was memories and hallucinations, but they were weaved expertly into the story. The ending was controversial. Was Moonlight Man real or not? Strangely, those who thought he was real and those who thought he was imaginary both liked the ending. The poster of Carla Gugino in her slip, chained to the bed, is a best seller, for some reason.