An extended stay at the Overlook Hotel could cost you your sanity

Rating: 9/10 (18 March 2019)

Aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson giving one of his most zestful and inspired full-tilt nutso performances) takes a job as caretaker of the large posh Overlook Hotel while it's closed for the winter off season. However, a maleficent supernatural presence in the hotel eventually drives Torrance dangerously around the bend.
Director Stanley Kubrick relates the absorbing story at a leisurely, yet still hypnotic pace, makes excellent extensive use of the sprawling main location, says something profound and disturbing about the horrors of narcissism in which people are too self-absorbed to see the insanity going on in others around them until it's too late, further spruces things up with a wickedly funny sense of pitch-black humor, and adroitly crafts a powerfully intense, oppressive, and unsettling gloom-doom atmosphere that really gets under the viewer's skin.
While Nicholson has been fiercely criticized for going way over the top as Torrance from the get go, Wacky Jack nonetheless deserves praise for totally throwing himself into the juicy role and provides a hugely entertaining spectacle when he completely flips his wig in the delirious last third. (It's also the key grim point of the picture that Torrance clearly isn't stable even at the beginning, but everyone else in his immediate proximity is too caught up in their own little worlds to realize the obvious about him.) Moreover, there are sterling contributions from Shelley Duvall as the mousy Wendy, Danny Lloyd as sensitive little boy Danny, Scatman Crothers as easygoing psychic cook Hallorann, Barry Nelson as polite manager Ullman, Philp Stone as the serenely pernicious Grady, and Joe Turkel as friendly bartender Lloyd. John Alcott's sumptuous cinematography boasts plenty of exquisitely fluid and elongated tracking shots. The rattling and majestic orchestral score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind hits the spine-tingling spot. Essential viewing.