Word: kubrick
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JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT it was safe to go back into a hotel, walk down an empty hallway into a furnished room and draw a warm bath comes Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a brilliantly precise and demanding film that turns horror into art and art into horror. With obsessive simplicity, Kubrick manipulates the pieces of an ordinary world--a family, a kitchen, a bathroom, a television--to create an extraordinary image of terror and death...
Script and crypt have always crept menacingly side by side in Kubrick's imagination. This latest film explores the death of love in post-war (and pre-WAR) America. It depicts the horror of a people who watch their own bloody past on TV, paint a bloodier future in books and movies Kubrick's included), and sit nervously waiting to be swallowed by an inevitable, self-destructive evil...
...horror movie should be about jumping out of your seat and gagging on popcorn and clutching the stranger next to you in a bear hug. In this regard, The Shining is strangely flawed. Kubrick's film contains more than two hours of intellectual horror, too much suggestive fear for those audiences hoping for a bood and guts creature form the black lagoon/omen/jaws/prophecy, or even those expecting Hitchcock-like suspense. It demands patience, a susceptibility to delicate suspense, a relish for the ounce of boredom that wafts through a hallway before all hell breaks loose. And even with these allowances...
This is a movie of false clues and red herrings. It is a measure of Kubrick's artistry that he states his only supernatural theme, that of reincarnation, so lightly that it could be missed entirely. One has to connect the enigmatic scene involving a nude woman in Room 237 with the film's last image, of a photograph taken in 1921, in order to apprehend it. That, too, could be a false clue, since everything Nicholson does can be attributed to psychosis, to a weakened mind placed under intolerable pressure by isolation...
...that this is a canonical work, something that only those who find Stanley Kubrick to be one of the world's great living film artists will respond to. By taking a book by an author who is at the center of the craze for the supernatural, and turning it into a refusal of and subtle comment on that loopy cultural phenomenon, Kubrick has made a movie that will have to be reckoned with on the highest level...