Til deaths do us part.

Alfred Hitchcock could have presented this. Roald Dahl would have considered this a Tale Of The Unexpected. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage, adapted by King himself from his 2010 novella sees the famed horror writer step away from the spooks once again to explore the everyday horror of domestic violence and murder in a straightforward thriller with a twist.

For twenty-five years, Bob Anderson (Anthony LaPaglia) has been the kind of husband who buys the right anniversary gift, tops up the wine without being asked, and keeps the household ticking along in suburban harmony. He’s also, it turns out, been a serial killer. When his wife Darcy (Joan Allen) stumbles on some disturbing evidence and pieces the truth together, what follows is one of Stephen King’s coldest, most procedural dissections of marriage, loyalty, and the limits of love.

Joan Allen carries the film with a precision that mirrors the script’s own clipped structure. She doesn’t play Darcy as a woman shattered by revelation, at least not immediately, instead building a portrait of denial as endurance: every smile forced through gritted teeth, every polite nod hiding calculations. It’s a measured, interior performance that only falters when the script insists on telling us what we’ve already seen in her eyes. LaPaglia is credibly low-key as Bob, all affable menace and soft-spoken control, lending verisimilitude to the idea of his being a killer hiding in plain sight; the kind of evil that doesn’t need to raise its voice because it’s always confident it won’t be caught.

King’s screenplay stays tight to the source material but trims some of the novella’s psychological complexity in favour of a leaner, more procedural structure. King’s writing always crackles with his characters’ inner lives and it’s always the aspect that is compromised the most in the transition to the screen. Darcy’s inner life, her rationalisations and private reckonings, aren’t fully externalised and the resultant lack of moral ambiguity gives the drama a lightweight feel.

Director Peter Askin doesn’t indulge in stylistic theatrics; the film is competently shot if visually bland but it kind of suits the material. The dread in A Good Marriage isn’t out and loud, it’s hidden behind a cloak of everyday banality, creating something that’s less a thriller and more a thought experiment: what would you do if your life partner turned out to be a killer?

Fidelity to the source is near total, though there’s a faint hesitation to commit to the novella’s final stretch of ambiguity, adding clarity where the story opted for opacity, particularly in how it handles the final confrontation and the suggestion of complicity. There’s a moral neatness that King the screenwriter indulges but King the author left artfully unresolved.Stephen King’s A Good Marriage doesn’t aim for shock value, nor does it deliver catharsis, settling instead for a sly, dark irony. It’s not classic King, but it’s a decent little potboiler with solid performance and a dark if underexploited premise.