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SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'd seen it two or three times already, yet I felt as if I'd just 'discovered' Misery when I watched it on DVD last night. (It's easy to take subtext for granted in so efficient a pulp thriller.) Lauren Bacall delivers the line that did it for me very early in the film. As an agent representing best-selling author Paul Sheldon (James Caan), whose newest book dispatches the franchise character responsible for his fame, she chides him thusly: "Misery Chastain put braces on your daughter's teeth and is putting her through college. She bought you two houses...and what thanks does she get? You go and kill her."

We can therefore observe Paul's subsequent violent car accident during a blizzard and veritable abduction from the wreckage by lunatic "number-one fan" Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates, checking her vanity at the door in an Academy Award-winning performance) as his karmic payback for biting the hand that feeds him. Based on the celebrity paranoia novel by Stephen King, Misery is a revenge from beyond the grave tale in which the dead never existed outside the collective imagination of the reading public; in many ways, what we have here is a more mature handling of themes King first tackled in The Dark Half, the story of a writer who is literally stalked by his pseudonymous self.

Annie's part in this cosmic retribution is to keep Paul physically and emotionally handicapped as he pens a spur-of-the-moment resurrection of his beloved heroine. Paul's torturous weeks in this makeshift prison in turn represent a cleansing process, not only for his sins against his brainchild, but also those against his calling. (Literary Paul accuses himself of being a mass-market sell-out in said meeting with his agent.) King sees the artistic temperament as profoundly Catholic, thriving as it does on, well, misery, and guilt; at Misery's end, Paul, having suffered Annie's vituperation to an apparently redemptive degree, has a clearer conscience about writing something for himself, remarking, "In some way, Annie Wilkes--the whole experience--helped me."

None of this will strike a cord with non-scribes--but then, from the outset, Misery discourages identification, considering how drastically Paul's career specializes his predicament with Annie. That's not to say general audiences respond to this suspenseful film in a purely Pavlovian manner: however polemically, Misery also preys upon what Rita Kempley termed in her 1990 review "our fat phobia," and solicits feelings of classist superiority from its more educated viewers. Regardless of which buttons he presses, I wish Rob Reiner still knew how to work us so effectively.

MGM's Misery DVD recycles PolyGram's two-year-old master, which actually isn't too shabby. While not anamorphically enhanced, both the 1.85:1 and open-matte versions feature eye-popping shadow detail and strong yet controlled colours. I will concede the letterboxed transfer has a digitally processed look that leads to shimmer in vertical fields, but this only becomes an issue in exterior scenes, and a mild one, at that. Audio is Dolby Surround, and it sings; "Shotgun" sounds especially good. Two trailers, animated menus, and a booklet are also included.-Bill Chambers