A Good Marriage (2014)

Peter Askin's 2014 adaptation of Stephen King's novella arrives with the modest ambition of a Sunday afternoon cable thriller, and it fulfills that ambition with a grim sort of competence. Joan Allen plays Darcy Anderson, a Maine housewife of twenty-seven years standing who discovers, while hunting for batteries in the garage, that her husband Bob (Anthony LaPaglia) has been the serial killer known as Beadie. What follows is a study in domestic dread conducted almost entirely among white, middle-class New Englanders. Pun Bandhu appears briefly in a supporting capacity and is given nothing to do. Race is not a subject the film raises, examines, or seems aware of. The suburbia on display is unmarked and unexamined, which is to say the film has no argument to make about it.

The marital reckoning at the center is, on its surface, a story of a woman discovering her husband's monstrosity and eventually shoving him down a staircase and suffocating him with a plastic bag. This is the standard machinery of the domestic thriller, in operation since long before anyone thought to file paperwork on it. Darcy's violence is the violence of the genre, not of a thesis. She kills to survive and to keep her children, and the film rewards her with a quiet retirement and a clear conscience. Any viewer hunting for an articulated statement about marriage, patriarchy, or female autonomy will find the cupboard bare.

Bob's explanation for his crimes involves a dead school friend named Brian Delahanty who allegedly infected him with certain ideas, a lurid account that treats madness as a communicable stain instead of a condition deserving nuance. The film has no interest in mental health, in class, in the environment, or in any of the conversations its contemporaries were having. It is a suspense piece, competently acted, mildly plodding, and entirely without a sermon. In this house nobody is preaching. Somebody is simply dead.