A Horror Film You Feel More Than You Understand
Nerdy Up North
The setup
Writer Jack Torrance moves his family into the Overlook Hotel to work as its winter caretaker. As Danny's psychic ability reveals the hotel's violent past, isolation and the supernatural begin pushing Jack toward violence against his own family.
The Shining is one of those films that is almost impossible to talk about like a normal horror movie because so much of it is about how it makes you feel rather than what actually happens.
On paper the story is straightforward. A family gets trapped in a massive hotel over winter and the father loses his mind. The film takes nearly two and a half hours to get there, though, and Kubrick makes you sit in that hotel for every minute of the build up. There are long corridors, empty rooms, the sound of Danny's tricycle changing as it moves from carpet to hard floor, and Jack sitting at a typewriter apparently achieving absolutely nothing.
That slowness is the point. It feels like waiting for a kettle to boil while knowing something horrible is going to happen when it finally does.
Jack Nicholson is iconic as Jack Torrance, but watching it again I do have one problem with the performance: he looks like he is already halfway gone when he arrives for the job interview. There is not much of a descent into madness because Nicholson has that dangerous look from the beginning. When he finally gets the axe and goes fully over the edge he is incredible, but part of me would have liked to see a more ordinary Jack slowly disappear.
Shelley Duvall gives the film something completely different. Wendy is frightened, nervous and constantly being pushed down by Jack, and once the film turns violent her panic feels horribly real. The performance makes even more sense when you know how difficult the production was for her. I still prefer the stronger version of Wendy from King's novel, but Duvall's terror is a massive part of why the final act works.
Danny Lloyd is also remarkably good considering his age. Danny never becomes that irritating horror movie child who exists purely to ignore warnings and make everything worse. The 'redrum' scenes, Tony and the conversations about the shine make him strange without making him unbelievable.
Visually, this film is ridiculous. The Overlook is the real star. The carpet, the maze, the impossible hallways, Room 237, the twins and that lift full of blood have been copied and referenced so often that you can forget how effective they are in context. Rooms and objects do not always seem to line up properly, which makes the whole building feel wrong before you can explain why.
The score and sound design do the same thing. Sometimes almost nothing is happening on screen but the sound is telling you to be uncomfortable. It can suddenly calm you down and then start winding the tension back up again without a jump scare anywhere in sight.
The book and the film are very different beasts. King's Jack is more sympathetic and the Overlook's hold over him feels like a slow destruction of a man already battling addiction. Kubrick is more interested in trapping you inside the hotel with a family that already feels unstable. I can appreciate both without needing one to cancel out the other.
Then you get the final chase through the maze, Danny covering his tracks and Jack freezing to death with that bizarre expression on his face. The frozen Jack shot is probably the one image I like least in the whole film, but everything leading up to it is burned into horror history.
Positives
Incredible cinematography and production design, the Overlook feels like a character, iconic imagery, brilliant sound design and score, Jack Nicholson is unforgettable once the film explodes, Danny Lloyd is excellent.
Negatives
Jack already feels unhinged from the beginning, so the descent is limited, Wendy is much less developed than in the novel, the slow pace will not work for everyone, frozen Jack looks oddly goofy after such an intense climax.
Verdict
The Shining is less about being scared by a monster and more about being trapped somewhere that feels wrong. It is slow, beautiful, uncomfortable and full of images that have become part of horror culture. I understand it far more as an adult than I ever did when I expected it to be a straightforward scary film.
