Kubrick does Horror !!!

Rating: 9/10 (7 November 2017)

Kubrick was exceptional at making every film that he made feel like a 'Kubrick film' irrespective of what the source material might be. 'The Shining' is a Kubrick film through and through even though it is based on a Stephen King novel, who himself has a singular, unique voice. Visually, the film has all the Kubrickian elements like the use of wide angle lenses, the use of deep focus, the use of one point perspective, the extensive use of tracking shots, characters doing the Kubrick stare, precise use of the zoom, etc. Particularly the score in the film By Wendy Carlos is just phenomenal. The music and the score is essential and indispensable in creating the dread that Kubrick is looking for. But tonally too, the film has Kubrick written all over it, since unlike King's novel, the movie is relentlessly inhuman and pessimistic.
In the book, Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic who genuinely loves his family, but ends up falling prey to the lure of the evil that is the Overlook Hotel. But there certainly is a humanity to him. In Kubrick's film, Jack Torrance never comes across as anything other than an unsettling character. Casting Jack Nicholson for this role had to have been a specific choice. Jack Torrance in the film is a creepy, unlikable man who seems like someone who was always on the verge of slipping into complete madness and the foreboding isolation of the Overlook Hotel only acts as a catalyst in that process.
While the novel has clear supernatural mystical elements, the film retains a sense of ambiguity throughout its running time. Kubrick constantly juggles elements of the supernatural with the question that maybe all this happening in the minds of the characters and maybe, just maybe, we are watching the events from the POV of unreliable narrators.
'The Shining' is a horror film, but not in the sense that it is very scary. I don't think the film is very scary, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. I think 'The Shining' is an example of film that expertly uses a bone chilling sense of dread along with visceral imagery to unsettle and disturb the viewer instead of merely scaring him/her. The film opens up its scope towards the end and especially with the last shot to suggest the historical and cyclical nature of violence, evil and human vileness which is quintessential Kubrick, but at the heart of it, 'The Shining' is a story about a family with a deeply flawed masculine figure with a death wish. His violence against his wife and his child is unsettling because it's the kind of horror that is too real and too familiar in our world.