"A tremendous sense of Isolation"

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2007)

After his greatest achievement in the sumptuous period drama Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick moved on to make his statement on the horror genre. A massive shift in focus, but perhaps not such a surprise since there were elements of horror in 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.
Kubrick's greatest strength is probably in that he always followed his own muse, regardless of what was going on in cinema at any one time. Of course, he was sometimes influenced by his contemporaries, but he never followed a trend. The Shining is at once bold and innovative, yet also nostalgic and old-fashioned. In a way this mimics the story's theme of history repeating itself and the overlapping of past and present events Â– a typically Kubrick-esquire mixing of style and content.
The atmosphere of The Shining is created through use of space and place. Kubrick shows us two kinds of space at the Overlook Hotel. There are vast, empty spaces such as the grand hall and the gold room, generally revealed to us in slow zooms. Jack is more often shown in these rooms, and they represent his growing isolation from his family and his detachment from reality. Then there are the winding passages like the corridors and the maze, which Kubrick's camera explores with steady tracking shots. More often than not it is Wendy and Tommy whom the camera follows through these passages, and this gives us the sense of confinement and helplessness of their situation.
In terms of place, The Shining is in a way a Heart-of-Darkness style journey into hostile territory. The opening credit sequence tells us this right at the start, as we see Jack's car travelling higher and higher into the mountains, a tiny dot from the helicopter shot. The Overlook Hotel resembles its mountainous surroundings, both in shape and colour. Kubrick's construction of space and place combine to create the nightmare situation Â– a place which is in itself massive and spacious, but which is also a prison, cut off from the outside world.
Kubrick is perhaps best known for bucking trends, and rejecting by-the-book approaches, and The Shining does go against the horror grain in several respects. Perhaps most notable is the light. Whereas virtually every horror film prior to this had exploited the darkness, The Shining (as its title suggests) is filled with light and brightness. It's also something of a return to the early days of horror, largely favouring creepy atmospherics over slasher shocks. In fact, there is a very direct and obvious reference to DW Griffith's Broken Blossoms (not actually a horror, but it's still got the axe moment) and even Shelley Duvall's performance towards the end slips into wonderful Lillian Gish-style melodramatics.
The Shining is tightly constructed, and it certainly stands out from its contemporaries in the genre, but like many of Kubrick's films it is seriously overrated. For all its supposed sophistication some of the horror moments are terribly camp and corny Â– for example the old woman in the bathtub does the most ridiculous zombie lurch I've seen outside of B-horror. Those quick zooms and that snare thing on the soundtrack that accompany every shock moment are massively overused and soon become tedious. For my money the supernatural horror elements do not really work Â– he just doesn't get the creepiness right. It's only the real-life, psycho-killer aspects that have any impact here, and this is mainly down to the intensity of the acting performances. I'm risking flak by saying this, but maybe the film would have been better if Kubrick left out all the ghosts and just told a story about a man's journey into murderous insanity.