Rewatch – The Shining

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers
Year: 1980

Original Rating: ★★★★☆
New Rating: ★★★★★

So I was wrong about The Shining.

I’ve seen it probably six times over the years. Always appreciated it. The visuals. The Steadicam work. The twins. “Here’s Johnny.” Classic horror iconography. But I always had this nagging feeling that it was cold. Clinical. That Kubrick was so obsessed with technical perfection that he forgot to make me feel anything.

I watched it again last week. On 4K. Alone. At night. And something clicked that hadn’t clicked before.

Kubrick wasn’t failing to create emotion. He was creating a very specific emotion. Dread. Not fear. Dread. The slow creeping certainty that something terrible is going to happen and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The whole movie operates at that frequency. From the opening helicopter shots over the mountains to the final frozen image. Dread. Constant. Unrelenting.

Jack Nicholson’s performance. I used to think he went too big too early. Like he was playing crazy from scene one. But now I think. Okay stay with me here. Jack Torrance was always broken. The hotel didn’t break him. The hotel recognized what was already there and invited it to the surface. Nicholson plays him as a man barely holding it together from the start because that’s who Jack Torrance IS. The alcoholic. The abuser. The failed writer. The hotel didn’t corrupt an innocent man. It gave a monster permission.

And Shelley Duvall. Oh my god Shelley Duvall. Everyone knows Kubrick tormented her on set. Did hundreds of takes. Isolated her from the crew. Made her miserable. And you can argue about whether that was ethical — it wasn’t — but what’s on screen is genuine terror. When she sees what Jack has been typing. When she’s backing up the stairs with the bat. That’s not acting. That’s survival. It’s horrifying and it’s effective and I feel complicated about the fact that it works.

The sound design. I don’t think I ever really HEARD this movie before. The score is dissonant and wrong in a way that gets under your skin. There are moments of silence that feel louder than explosions. Kubrick uses the Overlook Hotel as an instrument and he plays it perfectly.

The theories. The moon landing. The genocide of Native Americans. The impossible architecture. I’ve read them all. Watched the documentaries. And honestly? I don’t think any of them are “right” but I also don’t think they’re wrong. Kubrick built a movie that INVITES interpretation. That refuses to be pinned down. That keeps revealing new layers forty-five years later.

Stephen King famously hates this adaptation. Says it misses the point of his book. And he’s right — Kubrick’s Shining is a fundamentally different story than King’s Shining. But I think they’re both valid. King wrote about addiction as possession. Kubrick made a film about the horror of family, of domesticity, of being trapped with people who are supposed to love you.

I was wrong. I gave this four stars before. It deserves five. It’s not just a great horror movie. It’s a great movie period.

Kubrick knew what he was doing. Obviously. He always did.

My rating: ★★★★★

The Shining on IMDb | The Shining on Rotten Tomatoes