MC
Marco Castellini
•Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer, accepts a job as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, an isolated and luxurious resort in the Rocky Mountains, convinced that the isolation and tranquility of the place will inspire his creativity. The hotel, however, hides a mysterious past: the previous caretaker had slaughtered his family, without apparent reason, in a murderous frenzy. Nevertheless, Jack is not intimidated by the past events and brings his family (wife and a seven-year-old son) with him, but soon realizes that things are not going as he hoped: he fails to resume his work and the forced isolation makes him nervous. The man begins to lose his mind, identifying with the old caretaker and seeking to repeat his deeds... Kubrick dives into horror and, as was inevitable, leaves an indelible mark of his passage by directing an exciting, engaging, and terrifying work at the same time. A dark and claustrophobic film, where everything revolves around the symbolic figure of the labyrinth (the hotel corridors, the wallpaper designs, the garden paths); a film made of ambiguous signals, where the horror is as deep as it is less interpretable (madness, hallucination, possession?). The director's maniacal attention to detail, motivated by the need and conviction to always direct "formally perfect" films, is evident from the first sequences (with the camera following, step by step, the car through the mountain turns) and adds even more charm and interest to the film. Many sequences have entered the history of the genre and influenced dozens of subsequent horror films; just to mention a couple: the face of a possessed Jack Nicholson terrifying Shelley Duvall as he emerges from the door just destroyed with axe blows, or the wave of blood that invades the Overlook Hotel corridors. No less important for the film's success are the masterful performances of the protagonists: as mentioned, Nicholson above all, with his grins and expressions, manages to create a state of anxiety and terror in the viewer on his own, but perfect, in their respective roles, are also Shelley Duvall (the wife) and the young Danny Lloyd. One last curiosity: the story is based on the splendid eponymous novel by Stephen King, but the latter has complained that Kubrick took "too many liberties" in adapting his novel and thus partly betrayed the spirit of his work. Difficult, in this case, to agree with the great American novelist.
