now this is a good horror flick!

Rating: 9/10 (12 July 2007)

"Stay scared." That is what famed horror novelist Mike Enslin (John Cusack) would tell his fans during booksigning, and that's exactly what you feel for the better part of the movie. In this chilling short story by Stephen King directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, you WILL scream in spite of yourself.
I saw this alone in my room one night and I endured the good creepy build-up leading to skeptical Enslin's fateful entry into Room 1408 of the haunted Dolphin Hotel. I liked the motivated use of extreme close-ups to add to the claustrophobia, and the bird's eye view shots that give a feeling of someone watching over everything. The scary, unsettling cinematography and the masterful, fragmented visuals really make you feel the fear.
Cusack makes 1408 work. His almost one-man act makes a good case of cynicism at the beginning. When he says: "sarcophagal chambers; hotel rooms are naturally creepy places" you just keep waiting to be defied. I will never hear The Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun" the same way again nor look at radio clocks as innocent harbingers of time. You keep expecting the worst. You share his panic and frustration. For your own self-preservation, you want to believe him when he tries to talk sense to his tape recorder to calm himself. The 'power of suggestion' is indeed very strong; the score and sound effects are effective and thoughtful, with enough moments and good pacing for you to sober up till the next.
The momentum is destroyed, however, when the specters are actually shown. Major plot hole: why suddenly think of his laptop and cell phone too late? The monster-like thing bent on hacking him also had a pathetic mask; and then it just starts getting silly (check out what gets faxed to him), then melodramatic in the exposition of his own 'personal ghosts' that he is helplessly exorcising. He is forced to just 'ride it out' like the aftermath of a hallucination gone awry.
Then it starts to get even more fantastic and ridiculous, getting harder to accept as even stranger things happen in the "Kafkaesque hotel". Cusack is just such an excellent actor that you still are emotionally tied to him despite the circumstances and share his despair of getting yanked back and forth into alternate realities. Reliving the horror of loss with him was cruel, rude and shocking, but the cheesy dialogue punctuated with the wry humor only he can truthfully deliver helped.