Bag of Bones – a 2011 TV miniseries

I’m not even going to try and make a comparison between the movie and the book. Partly because, like I mentioned before, when I decided to take part in the Stephen King Project challenge, I’ve read the book years ago and many details are lost in the depths of my memory – I do remember the main idea of the story and I remember liking the book.

Now, back to the movie.

Michael Noonan is a writer about to finish a novel. Just before he types out the last sentence, he goes downstairs and asks his wife to come with him. He sits her down at the computer and he tells her what to write. I can’t write without you, Jo – these words will reverberate through the story, just one of the threads that will tie everything up into a coherent and believable tale.
But then Jo dies and Mike discovers she had been pregnant at the time of her death. Plagued by doubts and depression, he decides to go to a house that was left to him and his brother by their late father, a house in a town called Dark Lake Score, where Jo had spent a lot of time in the year before her death. There, hard at work on his next novel, Mike is also trying to find out if his wife had been unfaithful to him. Piecing together the clues he gets (messages spelled with magnets on the fridge door, a bell, songs, dreams, books and even his own writing) Mike is starting to unravel the mystery that seems to hang above the small town like a threatening cloud. A little girl that is the cause of a custody battle, an old man that had apparently committed suicide and another one that is living his last days in a nursing home, they all are crucial characters. In time Mike finds out about the tragedy that played out in the small town, a horrific death going back to 1939 and a curse spoken with a dying breath. A curse that also affects his family. The end is open, teetering between hope and despair, an ending worthy of a King book.

I liked the movie a lot. I thought it was well made, the actors’ performance very good – I’ll give it extra points for casting Pierce Brosnan (one of my favorite actors) as Mike – the action fast paced and the story well put together. There are dreams within dreams within dreams, songs from the 1939 (fictional, of course) and visions of dead people. There was also a scene at the beginning of the movie that made me jump and want to turn on all the lights in the house.
There is a reference to Misery, another one of King’s novels, and one of the songs played in the movie, Motherless Child, was also recorded by Martin Gore (songwriter of Depeche Mode). A movie based on one of my favorite author’s books and a song that led me back to Depeche Mode. How can I not like this movie?

Have you watched the movie or read the book?

Coming soon: two reviews, 11.22.63 by Stephen King and Sudden Flash Youth – 65 Short-Short Stories, and a giveaway!