If all you know about Misery is the infamous scene where Kathy Bates wallops James Caan’s ankle with a sledgehammer, you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of the new Collector’s Edition Blu-ray from Shout Factory. While the ‘hobbling’ scene is what earned the film pop culture immortality, Misery is a riveting thriller from first frame to last, and it has lost little of its power in the decades since its original release.
Much of that power can be attributed to the brutal simplicity of the concept. Like Jaws or Halloween, Misery benefits from an idea so simple it’s a wonder no one conjured it up before Stephen King set pen to paper.
Paul Sheldon (Caan) is a commercially successful but artistically stultified writer with a career built on the backs of the Misery books, a series of historical romance books (the main character’s name is Misery, natch). Paul has finally had enough, and so he writes a final Misery book that kills off his protagonist and then retreats to a mountain lodge to write something new and fresh. But while driving down the mountain with his completed book, Paul is caught in a sudden blizzard and careens off the road, destroying his car and damaging his legs.
By a stroke of ‘luck’, Paul is rescued by Annie Wilkes (Bates), a former nurse who now lives alone in a cabin a few miles removed from the nearest town. And as ‘luck’ would have it, the brightest part of Annie’s lonely existence is the Misery books, and she’s just delighted to have the Paul Sheldon as a house guest. But then Annie finds out that Misery is dead, and this number one fan becomes a whole lot less friendly.
Misery is largely a contained film, meaning director Rob Reiner and his team had to work overtime to make that containment feel cinematic. Director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld (yes, the Men in Black guy) and composer Marc Shaiman (yes, the South Park Movie guy) give the film a Hitchcockian throb of menace, as does production designer Norman Garwood, who constructs in Annie’s house a place of such benign pleasantness that it simply has to be a house of evil.
The legendary William Goldman wrote the screenplay, working in tandem with Reiner to ratchet up the tension as the film progresses. Despite being close to hours largely confined in one space, Misery never feels slow or even especially deliberate. Goldman expertly lays out the pieces and breaks up the exposition with explosions of terror and violence, and the result is a film that easily sidesteps what could have been a stagebound and ponderous atmosphere.
Misery occupies an odd place in horror history. Debuting in 1990, the psychological nature of its thrills and chills must have been quite a shock following a decade of a seemingly endless array of slasher series and supernatural fright flicks trying to one-up each other with outrageous gore and creature FX. But while Misery would seem to be more akin to the contemporary, low-budget thrillers spun out by the likes of Ben Wheatley and Karyn Kusama, the loud, broad nature of Bates’ performance and the bombastic work by Sonnenfeld and Shaiman make Misery feel like an even bigger throwback than it already was.
It all leads to Misery feeling like a film that doesn’t belong fully in the past or present. While that certainly contributes to the film’s themes of the cancerous relationship between artist and fandom feeling all the more universal, it also may be a contributing factor as to why Misery, hobbling scene aside, so often gets left out when discussing great modern horror, or even just great Stephen King movies (which is doubly odd given that Kathy Bates’ Best Actress Oscar remains the only Academy Award associated with a Stephen King adaptation).
Whether you are a pre-existing fan of Misery or checking it out for the first time, the new Collector’s Edition from Shout is a real treat. The transfer is gorgeous, really giving Sonnenfeld’s compositions a workout. The Blu also comes loaded with special features, including separate commentary tracks for Reiner and Goldman, terrific new interviews with Reiner and special effects maestro Greg Nicotero (this fucking guy is like the Where’s Waldo of the last forty years of genre cinema, turning up everywhere from the Evil Dead series to winning an Oscar for the Narnia movie to being the point-man for those Walking Dead zombies [and say what you want about the show {it’s dogpiss}, the zombies are amazing]), along with a whole bunch of featurettes exploring the story and the psychological profile of Annie Wilkes.
All-in-all, this film holds up as a truly one-of-a-kind little thriller, having lost none of its potency in the years since its first release. And thanks to Shout, there has never been a better time to take a nice dose of Misery.