The Shining

One of those films that is a classic for a reason.

It's been on my list of movies to watch forever and a day and I finally got to it in 2023.

This is an experience, masterfully shot and some of the most intense and engaging performances I have ever seen.

Nicholson and Duvall have a complex chemistry that works at so many levels, which is essential to the make up of this story and anchors the first class direction.

This is cinematically spectacular, the sets and the the design of this film is isolating, terrifying and captivatingly beautiful all at the same time.

Worth all of the accolades and hype, even at 43 years old this film delivers in spades.

Even though The Shining is over a quarter of a century old, I challenge anyone to not get freaked out by Jack Nicholson's descent into madness. This is a rare example of something so unique that no one has been able to rip it off; instead it has been referenced time and again in pop culture. The twins, the elevator of blood, RedRum, the crazy nonsense "writing"... this should be seen, if for nothing else, to understand all the allusions to it in daily life. The film is simultaneously scary, suspenseful, beautiful, and psychologically intriguing. It has the classic mystery of Hitchcock and the terror of a modern thriller. And it has what horror movies usually lack: a great script.

Sometimes all good horror needs is a good idea. But sometimes, rarely indeed, a horror masterpiece will reach us by the hand of a Kubrick, with the adept, elusive touch of a great artist to guide the vision, and we know what separates it from all else.

Okay, the story has enough promise that even a hired gun would have to try to fail. Heck, even Stephen King himself didn't fare so bad. It's how Kubrick perceives King's universe however, how he fills the frame with it, that renders THE SHINING a feast for the senses.

Horror that will reach us through the mind and body alike, an assault as it were, tending eventually its pitch to a crescendo, yet curiously not without a delicate lull.

Kubrick's cinema is, as usually, a sight to behold. We get the adventurous camera that prowls through the lavish corridors of the Overlook Hotel like it is some kind of mystic labyrinth rife for exploration, linear tracking shots exposing impeccably decorated interiors in symmetric grandeur. The geometrical approach in how Kubrick perceives space reminds me very much of Japanese directors of some 10 years before. In that what is depicted in the frame, the elements of narrative, is borderline inconsequential to how they all balance and harmonize together.

Certain images stand out in this. The first shot of Jack's typewriter, ominously accompanied by the off-screen thumps of a ball, drums of doom that seem to emanate from the very walls or the typewriter itself, an instrument of doom in itself as is later shown. A red river flowing through the hotel's elevators in a poetry of slow motions. Jack hitting the door with the axe, the camera moving along with him, tracking the action as it happens, as though it's the camera piercing through the door and not the axe. The ultra fast zoom in the kid's face violently thrusting us inside his head before we see the two dead girls from his POV. And of course, the epochal bathroom scene.

Much has been said of Jack Nicholson's obtrusive overacting. His mad is not entirely successful, because, well, he's Jack Nicholson. The guy looks half-mad anyway. Playing mad turns him into an exaggerated caricature of himself. Shelley Duvall on the other hand is one of the most inspired casting choices Kubrick ever made. Coming from a streak of fantastic performances for Robert Altman in the seventies (3 WOMEN, THIEVES LIKE US, NASHVILLE), she brings to her character the right amounts of swanlike fragility and emotional distress. A delicate, detached thing thrown in with the mad.

Kubrick, King and Nicholson, the writing was literally on the wall, and I don't mean RedRum, forty years on, and The Shining is still a masterpiece.

Kubrick takes King's fantastic book, and builds on it, bringing the story to life in his own inimitable way. It's dark, it's bleak, it's terrifying, a masterpiece in storytelling. You watch as the central character's mental collapse is played out in a spine chilling fashion.

Gorgeous camera work, incredible visuals, that opening is iconic. So many incredible, visual moments, the twins, lift, barman etc, no wonder it's been parodied multiple times over the years, famously by The Simpsons.

An iconic role for Jack Nicholson, he is incredible, well supported by a terrific cast.

It's a classic, 10/10.

Stephen King was so horrified at what Stanley Kubrick did to his 1977 novel he felt it necessary to later write his own alternative version for TV. Dismissed at the time as an anticlimax the pendulum of history quickly swung in the opposite direction, where it remains today.

Seldom commented upon is the obvious influence on Kubrick of 'Last Year in Marienbad' - already apparent in '2001' - with its endless tracks through an enormous soulless hotel in the middle of nowhere to the accompaniment of a glacial music score, within which Kubrick stages at least two moments worthy of his name for which the film has been carefully preparing us for over an hour: the discovery by Shelly Duvall exactly what her husband (played by Jack Nicholson as if he's auditioning for the role of Richard III) has been labouring on since his arrival and that she and her son are trapped in the middle of nowhere completely at the mercy of a maniac, and the final track into the photograph of Nicholson among the revellers on July 4th 1921 which is quite an ending but - like so much else in the film - to which there is probably far less than meets the eye.