United States, United Kingdom, 1980
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
With Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance), Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrance), Shelley Duval (Wendy Torrance), Scatman Crothers (Halloran)
First it is God’s eye, aerial shots taken high from the ground, as wide as the stunning and gorgeous mountainous landscape, as mobile as the tiny yellow car riding the never-ending strip of asphalt. How wild, awesome, and crucially far away of cities and people the place where the story is going to take place is fully conveyed, with a somehow hypnotic quality the swaying and spectacular camera motions and the singular, mysteriously modernist and jarring score, which is nevertheless crafted partly out of the “Symphonie fantastique” of Hector Berlioz. Whoever drives the car is right away cast as the next toy of supernatural and daunting forces. And the audience is as swiftly noticed that the tale is going to be handled in part by cinema techniques at their most spectacular, dramatic, audacious, sophisticated best – though it may feel the effort is also showing off virtuosity and technology.
Over the first quarter of the film, more or less, the narrative is rather straight and filled with enough hints, actually exposing plainly glaring hints, to gather what the plot is and how it could unfold. It is just another tale of a brilliant mind, or so the guy hopes he is, struggling to write novels. So far, Jack Torrance has been a teacher but has now decided to get another day job that would be far less demanding to set about making the book he dreams of, applying for a caretaker job in a sprawling and lavish hotel high in the Colorado mountains, tasked simply to watch everything is fine during the long period, from November to May, when it is closed. The job means plenty of free time and complete isolation, things a writer can relish. He is hired and settles down in the Overlook Hotel with his wife Wendy Torrance and their son Danny Torrance on the day the usual staff leaves for this winter recess, after seeing to it everything is in order and clean, with some members guiding the couple through the place and handing useful information, like chief cook Halloran.
But the hotel manager told Jack Torrance an appalling crime took place earlier at the Overlook, carried out by another caretaker who seemingly was not able to put up with the isolation the weather and the distance imposed and eventually hacked to death wife and children. But as she chats with the doctor called to look into the worrying collapse Danny Torrance had Wendy Torrance points out that the boy was once badly hurt by her father who came home drunk and got angry at the mess the child made with essays Jack Torrance had to correct – the incident was so terrifying the writer vowed never to drink alcohol again. But Danny indeed cut a slightly unsettling figure, altering in an uncanny, disquieting way his voice, making it hoarser and stranger, and swaying his little finger because it is his imaginary friend’s turn to speak and then got overwhelmed by horrific images of blood and ghosts the film readily displays. But the pleasant conversation with the kind and relaxed Halloran swiftly became an odd confession about a telepathic power connecting some chosen folks and enabling them to see strange things, a power that the old and clever African American felt Danny had as he told him in this talk that very conveniently explains the film’s title and hints loudly at further developments.
Now that the elements of the incoming tragedy have been exposed and the writing on the wall made plain – yes, the plot is all about a man slowly getting insane and enraged and eager to kill wife and child, but of course if some blood is shed (paying a visit under the influence of Danny’s shining power would prove a real bad idea) the purported victims would run away miraculously unscathed – the point is how things are going to be played out by the camera, the montage, the actors, possibly some twists and turns. We can suspect how nightmarish it is going to be, how the characters would collapse, but not how sight and sound would be and how they would impact us.
It is this long day of transition from the ordinary and dull life of the town and the school to the new world of the Overlook Hotel, as the Torrances discover the place and settle down that sets up the visual pattern that would lead to the horror. Tracking out as they walk with the staff, the camera shows them just walking, but walking endlessly in an ever-expanding space, walking in what is a bewildering variety of places up and down. The cuts, shortening the time this never-ending walking seems bound to take and switching to more crucial moments, like the start of the talk between Danny and Halloran, are striking: a moving image simply fades in another, the effect being of an odd fusion of the part of the space and the involved characters into another where characters emerge magically, something like a dissolution that is at the same time an apparition still taking place in a space that is decidedly sprawling endlessly, a kind of maze where everything seems to get not really morphed but oddly superimposed. And, as it happens, the visit of the hotel ends in a real maze, made up of old tall hedges, a funny garden which is the hotel’s favorite attraction but could as well be the drama’s next stage or the metaphor for minds getting lost and running amok (and of course…)
The shooting, underpinned by a clever, sophisticated use of that recent and splendid technical addition to the cinema techniques that the Steadicam was, and the rigorous and elaborate tracking in and out shots director Stanley Kubrick loves along with carefully geometric and symmetric shots, would just play with that disquieting logic of endless meandering in never-ending corridors and too huge halls leading increasingly to dead ends made up of stunning or terrifying visions. The hotel soon stops being a rational and manageable grid of corridors and rooms but grows up into an uncanny space locked unto itself, an eerie and troubling world where reality and delusion, more precisely chaotic present and surreal past, segue into each other at the most unexpected moment and through a mundane door.
The surprising final, black and white image even suggests past may be far more influential on the ordeal of Jack than could be imagined, forcing cleverly the audience to reconsider the man, the place, and the supernatural force at play. The straight lines eventually convey a hypnotic and weird sensation of circularity that conjures up the disorientation that can be experienced in a maze or in a state of confusion, even shock. The exterior maze happens to be the extension of the warped and destructive maze the hotel is by essence. The Overlook (what an apt, too apt in fact, choice of name, as its verbal form can mean, archaically, to supervise as well as to bewitch with the evil eye) is actually more than that: it is that supernatural and daunting force wreaking havoc.
The characters do not react the same way to what the hotel holds, fueling the suspense and sustaining the attention. Wendy turns out to be the more poignant case. She has only very lately those gory and terrible visions; during most of the narrative, she is the quiet and kind woman slowly compelled to face with the consequences of what those visions unleash in her son and husband, complete and unnerving surprises she struggles inevitably to grasp and drives her to try and escape – she senses how bad the place is. This is not quite the case of Jack who slides slowly into madness. He does experience deep shocks, collapses, panics, but not for long. He gets strangely accustomed to the unreal characters he sees and interacts with and gets more and more violent at the same time: the place gets hold of his mind and never lets him go.
It is from the start, even as his father was interviewed for the job, that Danny gets haunted by the Overlook. This is the sign he has the shining gift and this is his ordeal. In a way, his case is even more tragic than his two parents’: his very youth, his intelligence, his trust to his father and life are on the line of fire and he is an ideal prey that at point time looks doomed beyond hope but proves able to fight and survive. It is quite an extraordinary and heartbreaking role and it is performed with a striking talent, a real confidence, a graceful mix of smartness and tenderness. Actor Danny Lloyd deserves much praise, as much if not more than a Jack Nicholson who does not really tread on uncharted territories (given the eccentric roles where he shone in the previous years). He is remarkably troubling and mesmerizing, switching between mischievous charm and sheer insanity at an increasingly fast pace till the latter stifles the former chillingly. Actress Shelley Duval is also convincing in a part that is not an easy one.
Yet these actors, who have been definitely remarkably well cast, sometimes look like just the most vivid elements of what is a superlatively sophisticated camerawork, a formalist experience that tries to create terror out of a constantly rejigged view of spaces, exploring relentlessly a painstaking creation of visual patterns, garish and stunning decors (from the Gothic shape of the hotel to its incredibly colored carpets), lights set to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. The film can easily puts a spell on the audience, fascinates them, and of course thrills them as Jack Torrance starts to wander with an ax on his hands. It is hard, however, to view it as very scary: too much has been intimated to stun truly at and too many elements are mere freaks and stunts from outrageous bad dreams. In “The Shining”, the horror genre is revisited to experiment a specific, technical, arguably bold but deeply intellectual vision of cinema, a film investigating dangerous and dreadful psychic powers just to assert its own sway on the audience’s minds.