The Shining

UK Release Date. 5 October 1980
Certification. X
Running Time. 2 hours 24 min
Director. Stanley Kubrick
Cast. Scatman Crothers, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Jack Nicholson, Joe Turkel.
Rating. 81%

Review.

In October of this year, Empire published a list of the ‘50 Best Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die.’ The Shining topped the list. 45 years after the film’s original theatrical release, does Stanley Kubrick’s entry in the horror genre still merit this enduring reputation? A question I could contemplate as The IMAX Theatre at the Glasgow Science Centre screened a 4K restoration of an extended cut produced in 2019, in the run-up to Christmas.

Firstly, it's important to note that The Shining isn't your typical 1980s horror film. Kubrick's film is incomparable to the visceral terror of John Carpenter's The Thing, or the frenzied attack on the senses of Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street, or the pure supernatural spectacle of Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist.

Narratively, the film offers nothing particularly extraordinary, with a relatively simple plot. An aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) accepts a job as the off-season caretaker of The Overlook Hotel, a remote mountain retreat in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. After relocating his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd) to the hotel for the winter, Jack turns on his family as he descends into homicidal insanity. 

However, The Shining really isn’t about the narrative anyway; it’s about Kubrick's ability to progressively build up escalating tension, in tandem with ambitious and unforgettable set pieces. The film is a slow burn, with every unnerving twist and turn expertly foreshadowed. There are almost no cheap jump scares, there’s no huge body count, and there are no supernatural spectres to be exorcised. The Shining works by carefully and incrementally ratcheting up the unrelenting atmosphere of claustrophobic oppression, while extracting top-notch performances from its two lead actors. The wildness Kubrick coaxed out of Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall is mightily impressive [even if his methods were beyond questionable]. 

Based on a Stephen King novel of the same name, Kubrick's film is very different from the novel - specifically, details that are routinely explained, or at least easier to interpret, in the novel are either not included or left very ambiguous in the film - but the director succeeded in making a film awash with metaphors and symbolism that have prompted countless interpretations of the film's true meaning. 

The ambiguity stems from the fact that none of the main protagonists - Jack, Wendy or their five-year-old son, Danny - are reliable narrators. Given the overall themes of the film – isolation, the fragile human mind, and the lack of distinction between reality and the supernatural - multiple interpretations of The Shining's ambiguous narrative have been put forward over the years,

• Is this a straightforward case of an unstable individual descending into isolation-induced madness? It is possible to understand some of Jack's hallucinations. Often, when Jack thinks he is seeing other people, there is a mirror present - as a result, he may simply be talking with himself.
• Is this a tale of the supernatural? The Overlook Hotel perhaps existing as a malevolent entity, feeding on past traumas, and culminating in Jack becoming a ghost trapped in the hotel's history forever.
• Does The Overlook Hotel represent hell (or another form of afterlife for the ghosts, such as purgatory)? Figurative representations of hell can be found in other horror films of the time, and it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to believe Kubrick was presenting a similar metaphorical narrative.
• Or, does the narrative and symbolism mask a tale of sexual abuse where Tony, Danny’s imaginary friend, is Danny’s coping mechanism from the trauma of sexual abuse from his abusive father?

Some of these interpretations are more convincing (and coherent) than others, but at its core, The Shining is a story about violence and abuse and how these atrocities are often cyclical in nature.  

The ambiguity culminates in The Shining's now infamous, and for me, most challenging, conclusion. Kubrick's camera zooms in on an old black-and-white photograph hanging on the wall of hotel guests in the ballroom from 1921; a second zoom reveals Jack as a member of this crowd.

There is no real thematic resolution to the film. The final image doesn’t explain itself, and it is most likely not supposed to. Instead, the logic breaks, the image lingers, and that’s the point. Kubrick's ending fuels the idea that even when the credits roll, the story is never really over, as Jack has always been part of the hotel's harrowing legacy. 

However, I suspect that this elusive open-endedness is what makes Kubrick’s film so strangely disturbing and so endlessly watchable.