At first, Buster knows only that Paul Sheldon is the author of the Misery novels and has been staying at the Silver Creek Lodge working on a new book. Paul does think of scenarios where he might be able to kill or wound Annie, one in which he contemplates putting some Novril into a tub of her ice-cream, but he rejects this on the basis that Novril has a very bitter taste that Annie would probably notice.īuster ( Richard Farnsworth) and his charming wife Virginia ( Frances Sternhagen) are characters made up for the movie.

As for the book, there's no clue there because the wine-spilling scene never happened. Most viewers conclude that Annie did not notice the missing Novril after Paul's first outing, so she did not think he had laced her wine, concluding that the spill was most likely an accident caused by Annie's quick reaction after she knocked over the burning candle. It wasn't until he got out the second time, looked at her scrapbook, and took the butcher knife that she realized he was plotting against her, so she searched his room and found the knife as well as the hairpin 'key'. During the dinner, in fact, she seemed to be genuinely under the impression that she was actually making headway with him. It reveals only that, at the time of the dinner, Annie knew Paul had been out of his locked bedroom because the ceramic penguin had been moved, but she doesn't yet know how he got out. The movie does not provide conclusive evidence in either direction. We're here to put the story together.Viewers are torn on an answer to this question, some saying that she knew and that's why she knocked over the glass of wine, others saying she didn't know and the wine spill was an accident. But don't worry if the final scene left you scratching your head. In an era where toxic fandom is able to spread faster than ever before, Misery has only grown more relevant, and even without an allegorical perspective, the film stands on its own as a taut psychological thriller.

She keeps him in bed, even going so far as to crush his ankles, until he writes an ending to the Misery series she finds appropriate.

She nurses him back to health but soon learns that he plans on ending her favorite book series, causing her to go insane. In the film, she discovers that her favorite author Paul Sheldon (Caan) has just been in a horrible car accident, an event that echoes an accident in King's own life. In 1987, King came out with one of his best books to date, Misery, which was soon adapted into a feature film directed by Rob Reiner and starring James Caan and Kathy Bates. Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her disturbing portrayal of Annie Wilkes.

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