Word: nicholson
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...JACK NICHOLSON plays Jack Torrance with an incredible range of facial contortions and emotional gyrations. He keeps us laughing nervously along, alienated from Shelley Duvall's goofy Wendy, eager to see what new twitch he will add to his repertoire. His eyebrows flap like crazy crows and his mouth and eyes twist into an astounding collection of evil leers. Even his voice changes frequency. This brilliantly amusing psychopath is a stylized mixture of madman and dramatic artist, one glazed eye directed at himself, the other on Danny, who is played to terrified perfection by little Danny Lloyd...
From the start Kubrick hints at reversals to come. There is something false in Nicholson's bonhomie as he applies for the job. Shortly thereafter a history of drifting and alcoholism is casually alluded to. This man may not be the usual horror-story victim of the inexplicable. Quite the opposite; one begins to wonder if he might not turn out to be the source of the story's evil instead of its plaything. Then, too, his son's gifts for precognition and telepathy, also quickly established, do not seem to be evidence of demonic possession...
...settled in, Kubrick refuses to characterize the hotel as a conventionally haunted house. Its corridors are brightly lit, nothing goes bump in the night. Even the strange visions, when they begin to appear, are not necessarily to be seen as spooky apparitions, but as the hallucinations of a mind - Nicholson's - allowing itself to be drawn toward the violent conclusion the child has foreseen...
...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...
...daring thing the director has done, this bleaching out of all the cheap thrills, this dashing of all the hopes one brings to what is, after all, advertised as "a masterpiece of modern horror." Certainly he has asked much of Nicholson, who must sustain attention in a hugely unsympathetic role, and who responds with a brilliantly crazed performance...