A shiny hallucination

Rating: Null/10 (9 February 2003)

I absolutely love this film. It doesn't recur to gore excesses and the usual horror clichés (the old and isolated grand house that can only be haunted, lights going off and objects moving about by themselves, dark corners and dusty basements and attics...)but we have here a very clean and extremely well lighted place where it seems impossible that anything wrong can happen. But then, the most effective horror can be drawn from normal and totally pleasant-looking environments, which makes it more terrifying. Stanley Kubrick was a genius of visual compositions (his career began as a photographer), and among all of his films this one remains to me as his most beautiful. It is full of carefully composed and paced tracking shots where the hotel decor plays an essential part in the visual symmetry and composition: ample spaces where the characters look vulnerable, endless corridors and huge function rooms where one can almost get lost.The hotel is a gigantic maze that reflects the hedge maze outside, and the Torrance family are trapped in it.
The Stephen King novel is very good, but a bit boring and overlong, since it develops sub-stories about characters that are not relevant to this story, and tells the past of the Torrances in several flashbacks. Kubrick goes straight to business after half an hour,lets out anything that does not interest us here and changes the plot significantly and gives the story a completely different ending. Because of that, many fans of the novel didn't like the film when it first came out (it disappointed me too, when I fist saw it on television after reading the novel) and Stephen King himself hated it and fell out with Kubrick for what he considered it was a distorted and self-indulgent manipulation of his story. But new viewings of the film have helped me to discover its real quality and visual beauty and the way in which the horror is not actually shown explicitly but implied in our imagination through the characters' behaviour and the chilling score. The Torrances don't get slain one after the other every time someone goes off wandering by themselves like it always happen in the usual slash movie. Here the horror lies in the increasing hallucinations of Jack, the visions of Danny and the gradual mental breakdown of Wendy caused by Jack's bullying. The most chilling moments are the close-up of a dishevelled and stubble Jack staring blankly into space as his mind is cracking, and Wendy going through his manuscript only to find out that he has been writing one same sentence through hundreds of pages. That is a brilliant way of showing how a man is going insane before he actually starts using violence.
The only gore concession in the film is Halloran's axe murder, which may seem gratuitous since he was expected to take Wendy and Danny back to civilisation, leaving Jack to die alone in the hotel. But his failed mission has a purpose too, because his snow-cat is actually used at the end by the woman and the child to escape from that evil place. But then, since the hotel doesn't get destroyed like it happens in the book, the ending is open for another family of caretakers to come in next winter and the Overlook's evil circle to start again. Chilling.