The Shining (1980)

More impressed than frightened. That's the honest summary of where I've landed with The Shining after two or three viewings, and I think it's worth being upfront about that rather than just repeating the received wisdom. Yes, it's brilliant. Yes, Kubrick was operating on a level that most filmmakers never reach. And yes, I'd still tell anyone who hasn't seen it to drop everything and watch it. But repeat viewings have done something to the experience that I didn't quite expect, and I'm not sure it's entirely the film's fault.

The atmosphere is extraordinary. There's no getting around it. The Overlook Hotel feels genuinely wrong in a way that's hard to articulate, those endless symmetrical corridors, the impossible geometry, the sense that the building itself is breathing and watching. The blood pouring from the lift doors, the hedge maze in the snow, the women in the bathroom. These images are burned into you whether you like it or not, and Kubrick's control over every single frame is absolute. The man never made a careless shot in his life. If you want to see what that level of visual precision looks like earlier in his career, I loved The Killing for exactly that quality, and it's fascinating to trace the line from there to here.

The problem, and it is a problem by the third viewing, is the pacing. It is slow. I mean genuinely, sometimes punishingly slow. First time around, that glacial rhythm builds something, it creates unease, it makes you feel the isolation and the creeping wrongness of everything. But once you know where it's all going, once you're waiting for the moments you remember, the stretches in between start to feel very long indeed. The film asks a lot of your patience, and it doesn't always pay that back with the same interest.

Jack Nicholson is doing something extraordinary here, all coiled energy and barely suppressed mania from practically the first scene. You never quite believe he's a stable man even before the hotel gets its hooks into him, which is either a flaw in the casting or a deliberate choice by Kubrick to suggest the darkness was always there. I lean towards the latter. But Kubrick's characteristic emotional distance, that cold, clinical remove he brings to everything, makes it hard to feel genuinely connected to anyone on screen. It's closer to watching a beautifully constructed machine operate than it is to being scared. Which is interesting, and worth experiencing, but it's not quite the same as horror.

And then there's the cultural saturation problem, which isn't really anyone's fault. The Shining has been quoted, parodied, referenced and memed so relentlessly for decades that some of its most iconic moments arrive with an almost comic familiarity now. "Here's Johnny" lands differently when you've seen it a hundred times in other contexts. The shock has been sanded away. Kubrick faced something similar with 2001: A Space Odyssey, another film where the cultural footprint has become almost inseparable from the experience of watching it fresh. It's the price of being genuinely influential, I suppose.

None of this makes The Shining a lesser film in any objective sense. It doesn't. The craft is immaculate, the imagery is unforgettable, and Kubrick's ambition to make something that operates on a psychological and almost dreamlike level rather than a straightforward horror one was genuinely bold. There are sequences here that I'd put up against almost anything in the genre for sheer sustained dread.

But I'd be lying if I said it gripped me the way it once did. Three and a half stars. Watch it once, absolutely. Just know that if you're coming to it already steeped in the references, or if you're returning to it after a few years away, you might find yourself admiring it more than you're frightened by it. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it isn't.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1980  | Watched: 2025-07-18

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Stanley Kubrick: The Killing (1956) · Killer's Kiss (1955) · 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
More with Jack Nicholson: Chinatown (1974) · One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
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