Films

8.7Skry

The Shining

1980

A family takes up winter residence in a shuttered mountain resort — caretaker, wife, child — and the hotel proceeds to work on them with the patience of something that has done this before. Kubrick builds the horror not through concealment but through overexposure: wide-angle lenses, symmetrical corridors, rooms that reveal themselves too readily, an environment more legible than it has any right to be. Jack Nicholson plays the deterioration at a pitch that makes it hard to locate when performance becomes something else, while Shelley Duvall is cast against that volatility with a fragility that reads as psychological fact rather than contrast. Danny Lloyd, as the child with the gift that makes him the hotel's real target, anchors the film's more formally surreal passages.