MovieChat Forums > Gerald's Game (2017) Discussion > Mike Flanagan recycling his ideas

Mike Flanagan recycling his ideas


So i saw Hush recently and he used the same narration and visualisation trick to portray the main protagonist having conversations with herself and going through her options to survive.
It was so blatant that he did the exact same thing again.

Otherwise i think he does really decent movies, that have some neat ideas of editing in them.

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If you watch his entire filmography, you'll find that he reuses all sorts of ideas. This isn't a bad thing per se (like in my mind, Hush is a simple home invasion slasher film, but it has creative choices that defines itself from the crowd).

These design choices are tools to tell a story, and it's kind of neat actually to see how these things have improved and evolved over the course of his career.

Example, Haunting of Hill House's entire narrative structure is a more complicated, convoluted version of how Oculus is written.

Absentia's presentation of hypothetical and reality (just a small bit at the end) evolves into what he did to end Before I Wake. And both of this I think are related to his options-montage scenes that he uses in Hush/Gerald's Game. It's like they're all ways to tell a story without being grounded to reality, but without being surreal either. They're just visual expressions by what a character is thinking.

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