THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
Staying in one place for a long period of time is indeed challenging in a physical and mental capacity. You just have to know if it’s worth it once the effects kick in.
PLOT
Based on Stephen King’s titular 1977 novel, 1980’s The Shining follows writer Jack Torrance be assigned to be winter caretaker for the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, which is closed every season of winter. Jack uses this to invite his wife Wendy and young son Danny with him to join him for the season. He uses this as a way to keep them together after accidentally injuring his child in a drunken rage, remaining sober since the incident. As the Torrance family arrive on closing day, they meet head chef Dick Halloran who gives them a personal tour. However, he privately shares with Danny they have a telepathic connection he calls ‘shining’ and recommends him to avoid Room 237, claiming it to have residue from past incidents. A month into watching over the hotel, things are stranger than they seem. Jack starts having writer’s block as he tries to kill time by writing a new project, which frustrates him at every given opportunity. Wendy does continue to bond with her son when playing in a maze, but she discovers the phone lines to be out due to heavy snowfall. As a psycho, Danny would start to have frightening visions of the Grady twin daughters that were murdered by their father Charles Delbert Grady, the previous caretaker. Out of curiosity, he looks inside Room 237 but finds himself bruised in the process. When his mom sees them after he leaves that room, she suspects her husband to hurt him like before. As she tends to her son, Jack walks into the hotel’s Gold Room and meets the ghostly bartender named Lloyd. As he talks to him, he breaks his sobriety and shares his personal annoyance of his marriage. When Wendy finds him, she confirms that it was another woman who attacked Danny. When he investigates Room 237, he only sees a naked woman in the bathtub and he chooses to be unfaithful by kissing her. However, the woman reveals herself to be a ghost as it transforms to a rotted corpse. When he sees Wendy again, he tells him he didn’t find anything and argues on if Danny should still be in the hotel. When he returns to the Gold Room, he finds many ghosts participating in a costume party and meets the ghost of Delbert who insists on him to ‘correct’ his family like he did due to his son contacting Dick telepathically. As he does his form of correction by sabotaging the two way radio and the snowcat outside, Dick gets Danny’s message and gets inspired to fly from Florida to Colorado to check on the Torrance family. At the hotel, the boy frantically shouts ‘Redrum’ and calls himself after his imaginary friend ‘Tony’. After tending to her son again, Wendy finds Jack’s typewriter filled with an endless manuscript, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. When Jack confronts her, he gets hostile and threatens to harm her but he doesn’t get a chance when she knocks him out with a baseball bat and lock him in the kitchen pantry. He ends up getting free with the assist of Delbert’s ghost, encouraged again to correct his family exactly the way he did. Danny frantically shouts Redrum again, but Wendy realizes it is reverse for ‘Murder’ as the boy wrote it on a door and saw the word’s reflection. Upon realization, Jack has armed himself with a fire axe and plans to kill them all. Danny is able to escape through the bathroom window, whereas his mom has to slash her husband’s hand with a knife. As Wendy reaches the bottom of the hotel, she encounters many ghost and has a vision of cascading blood similar to what her son saw before. Dick arrives in another snowcat but just as he enters the hotel, Jack kills him with the axe and he follows Danny into the hedge maze as he hears him scream in shock. The boy however is able to trick his dad by covering his tracks and have him follow a false trail, hiding behind a snowdrift long enough to avoid him. He then leaves with his mom in the spare snowcat driven by Dick, leaving Jack to freeze to death. The film ends with the reveal of a photo from 7/4/1921, showing Jack to be part of the event that day.
THOUGHTS
Stanley Kubrick has been identified as one of the finest filmmakers to have ever lived because with each movie he directed are personal landmarks due to bringing their own artistic style. With such a decorated filmography he built in his lifetime, every kind of cinephile have their own favorite and I have no shame in saying The Shining is my favorite. It’s a true horror film unlike anything that was done at the time because with each moment that transpires, every second counts to the point you can’t take your eyes off. Each set piece for the Overlook Hotel is accurately disorienting to where you feel haunted by John Alcott’s cinematography. Whether you’re getting different views of the hedge maze or trying to follow little Danny on his Big Wheel, you’re just certain something wrong is eroding this setting and it will unfold in shocking fashion, in our very eyes. Even the score by Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind is mesmerizingly terrifying for the most part because it tells us to be on edge throughout. Even though King himself does not like the movie for going distant from his novel’s material, I still find myself impressed that between the creepy ghosts, it is still able to give a spin on something big to tell. In a way, the story is telling us to control your temptations or they control you and this would’ve not been well executed without seeing one character fall apart and everyone else just watches. Jack Nicholson is incredibly unhinged as Jack Torrance which makes it feel like this is the best thing to remember from his decorated career. Torrance is challenging to defend in this adaptation because there isn’t anything about him per se that makes him redeemable. He seeks control over his personal issues, but doesn’t want to take responsibility the way he thinks he does and it is this where it becomes easy for him to be corrupted. By the time he goes after his family and quote Johnny Carson, he goes so demented to the point where he enjoys the trauma he’s inflicting. He said he’d sell his soul to drink again and that is exactly what happens when he meets the ghosts of the hotel. The way Joe Turkel’s Lloyd & Philip Stone’s Delbert come off persuasive when they’re in fact manipulating an easy target comes to show how fast you can lose control without knowing it. For a long time, I’ve asked the same question on how is Jack part of the picture at the end. You can simply say he was a reincarnated version of someone from that time period, the way Delbert implies, but I can agree on one common theory how seeing him in the picture represents how his soul is forever trapped in the hotel. However you feel about Jack’s fate, you definitely feel remorse for those who encountered him at his lowest. I stand by my opinion when I say Shelley Duvall deserves her own flowers in giving her own layered performance as Wendy, after the mental toll she went through shooting this film. She is under the loop on what’s going on with her family and has to put the pieces together while also saving whatever happiness she’ll have left. Because she doesn’t think of the idea of the hotel being haunted until it’s too late, she’s got the right to be as frantic as she appears because she doesn’t know how to confront it. Thankfully, she got her solution by escaping her husband. The young Danny Lloyd was a scene stealer in his own right for making Danny Torrance who has his own confusion because he doesn’t know how to use his own powers he never thought he’d have. Because of his youth, he’s able to pick up the pieces whereas Jack lost his sanity so fast he couldn’t figure out what he had all along. As he learns though, he is able to be resourceful when outsmarting his father and escaping the hotel with his life. Of course, Danny would not have gotten to live a longer life, as shown in the sequel Doctor Sleep, had it not been for the unsung hero that is Dick. Scatman Crothers was incredible in this deuteragonist role because he has no true motive other than just looking out for someone who’s just like him. He tells Danny about shining because he doesn’t want him to be alone and doesn’t hesitate wanting to protect him once the opportunity. As seeing him get stabbed by Jack always gives chills down my spine, he still becomes the unsung hero because had he not shown up with the snowcat, Wendy & Danny would’ve not been able to escape the hotel and their souls would’ve been trapped the way it would happen to Jack. Thankfully, they avoid such a cruel fate with his unlikely contribution. This movie holds up well after decades apart from original release, but even masterpieces like this have head scratching moments that may be weren’t supposed to give off that impression. Like from the top, who or what from Denver gave Jack an opportunity to caretake in the first place? Like it doesn’t feel like being a writer is enough of a resume to be suitable for the role, especially when knowing of his past from Wendy. If we gotta get into continuity errors, let’s point out how Grady’s daughters were two years apart yet their ghosts resemble them as twins. I mean that should’ve been fixed considering how much of a perfectionist Kubrick was always described as. I don’t even see the point of Jack not being shown the kitchen by Dick. He’s gonna use it at some point during that 5 month gap, which makes it a weird way to separate Danny from his parents and get explained by Dick of what shining is. That even makes me think Dick also should’ve taught him how instead of telepathically speaking before explaining it to him because he could’ve scared the kid for Christ’s sake. I even feel like Jack’s cabin fever could’ve been avoided if he and the family went out into town before the blizzard kicks in. If they actually did, it would’ve been smarter to also show Jack was bound to lose it while going out. And why would Wendy leave Danny alone to warn Jack of what she saw? I know she’s scared but if she doesn’t any more harm to happen to him, she should’ve taken him with her and hell, he could’ve told his dad himself what he saw. That is way safer than staying in a locked room, even though nothing happened. I also don’t understand why Jack doesn’t tell Lloyd of the naked lady? If he doesn’t want his family to know and wants to believe what he’s seeing is real, I don’t see a reason not to. On top of that, what is the point of Delbert denying his past when he ends up admitting to it right after? I mean the ghost of Jack did the same thing in Doctor Sleep, so why does this chain reaction happen at all? Of all things that happens, this deserves the most explanation. Ignore this, then you’ll still love this for all its greatness. In conclusion, The Shining is one of the genre’s very best for being scary in more ways than one and if that is the kind of horror you seek, see this now.
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