Very unsettling, but missing the cherry on top

Rating: 8/10 (18 February 2009)

Wow. The first thing I must say is that I haven't been this much on the edge of my seat since I saw High Tension years ago. However the second thing I must say is I left the movie with a sense of dissatisfaction. The reason? The last quarter of the film.
From the time the spooky stuff started happening in this film I wanted it to reach the conclusion. Not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because I wanted to see how they were going to go about ending it. Not many movies leave themselves this many different roads to go down. Perhaps they had too many options because I feel they chose the wrong one. That being said it could've been worse also.
John Cusack plays Mike Enslin, a writer who receives a hint about the mysterious room 1408 in the Dolphin hotel in New York. He plays him adequately, but never really makes you say "wow" about him. Samuel L. Jackson plays the hotel manager who heeds the warnings and does so very well indeed. He really sets the scene well for this supposedly terrifying room and has us unnerved before we've even seen what it's capable of for ourselves.
What makes the film so unsettling from here on out is the combination of well executed frights and the unknowing of what is going on due to the earlier mentioned many avenues the story could go down. Credit here must go to director Mikael Håfström and of course the master of storytelling Stephen King.
1408 mixes elements of terrifying horror, intriguing thrills and even a few touches of drama and the result is a very solid, entertaining film. All involved deserve much praise. A few have been put off seeing it in the first place by the seemingly unoriginal story of a haunted venue. This is a shame because rarely is the concept done this well and those people are really missing a treat.