A Shining Piece in the Top Echelons of Cinema!

Rating: 9/10 (22 March 2015)

The Shining is a curious motion picture. While Stephen King (on whose novel 'The Shining' the movie is based) was largely ambivalent about the adaptation, for legions of filmaholics, it is an example of directorial bravura and an exemplary study of psychosis and unreliable terror. With its intensely suffocating sense of personality disintegration, The Shining is as unsettling as anything Stanley Kubrick made during his distinguished career.
At its core, The Shining is a simple haunted-house story. Jack Torrance (Nicholson) takes up a job at the unbelievably remote Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado (a place where many depraved incidents have happened, it has become something of a library of malevolent psychic energy) with his wife Wendy (Duvall) and his son Danny (Lloyd) in tow. They are to spend six and a half months as the winter caretakers for the hotel, separated from the rest of humanity by an unforgiving alpine winter. Jack's personality seems on the edge and we soon learn that he's a recovering alcoholic. Wendy is the kind of meek wife who follows her husband's lead while Danny has a disconcerting habit of conversing with himself, implied to be a manifestation of his psychic powers. Very soon, bizarre occurrences start happening and the movie flails off into an orgy of psychological terror. Wendy becomes concerned that her husband is losing his grip on sanity. And with a winter storm howling outside, the spacious hotel becomes a penitentiary. And the weirdness and danger escalate further as Jack slips over the edge from sanity to madness.
Nicholson's centerpiece performance is so absolutely terrifying and raw that it's no wonder he's spent the rest of his career in its shadow. Duvall as the mousy, jangled wife makes the most of her natural wide-eyed innocence, while Lloyd is equally compelling as the young boy who has the gift of the (paranormal) gab. The real star here, however, is Kubrick's direction. Kubrick creates a twisted environment in which mental stability, supernatural malignance and the sense of space and time shimmer and twist to dreadful effect. Kubrick presents much of the movie from Jack's point-of-view, and it becomes apparent that Kubrick wants us to become mired in the maelstrom of his disintegrating sanity. He however, never answers the questions about whether Jack's ghoulish visions are real or fabrications of his increasingly warped imagination, which adds to the eerie discomfort. By the end of the film, every inch of the hotel hints at something sinister and every frame is infused with a sense of the macabre.
With Kubrick's majestic fingerprints all over it, The Shining easily finds a place in the top echelons of cinematic achievements. A totally visceral experience!