The Shining (1980) review

I actually watched this before back in college because I was reading the book and wanted some visuals in my head. Back then I got bored quickly, and honestly I did not yet understand the language of older cinema. So I dropped it. Watching it again now, it is clearly a slow burn style of storytelling. But even on my second viewing I still could not keep my mind fully focused on it. The characters feel uninteresting to me, and Jack’s spiral into insanity feels too abrupt. I never felt like I was slowly entering his psychological breakdown. I never got the chance to be fully immersed in his mental state before everything exploded. The only scene that really grabbed my attention was the naked woman in the bathtub. At first it looks seductive and surreal, then suddenly it turns into a rotting corpse of an old woman. That reveal is disturbing. Other than that moment, the film was not scary for me. It mostly felt annoyingly weird rather than frightening. Wendy and Danny’s acting also reminded me of the strange performance style in A Clockwork Orange. That same exaggerated and slightly unnatural acting. Kubrick seems to favor this kind of performance where the characters feel slightly off from normal human behavior. It creates an eerie atmosphere, but sometimes it also distances me emotionally from the characters. Jack Nicholson, though, is undeniably great here. His facial expressions, the manic energy in his eyes, the way he moves through the hotel like a predator. Even if the story did not fully pull me in, his performance alone is memorable.