1408 film review

certificate_15

1408

A psychological horror based on a short story by Stephen King, 1408 bears many of the hallmarks of King's classic tale The Shining: a writer with alcohol and family problems checks into a haunted hotel and confronts imaginary and real demons. While the finished product is inevitably not a patch on Stanley Kubrick's 1979 masterpiece, 1408 is, for at least a good hour or so, a genuinely scary horror which only occasionally resorts to trickery. The film's final act lets it down badly however.

John Cusack runs a virtual one man show as Mike Enslin, a bestselling but jaded author specialising in ghostly phenomena. Mike has seen it all on his travels and while he is quite happy to perpetuate the myth of haunted buildings across America for the sake of his writing career, he really doesn't actually believe any of it.

When he receives a mysterious postcard informing him of the Dolphin Hotel in New York, and specifically room 1408, his interest is piqued and he sets off to chart this unexplored territory. An equally mysterious hotel manager (Samuel L Jackson in a cameo) tries his best to dissuade Mike from staying in the room (which has a strange and unusual history), but the cynic in Mike has none of it.

Soon after beginning his tenure as the room's latest resident, the weird stuff starts to happen. It would be a shame to give away exactly what this consists of, but director Mikael Hafstrom does more than enough to create an eerie sense of menace, and provides several unsettling moments for the audience. This isn't the lazy horror that has become the norm for many recent Hollywood releases: instead Hafstrom allows us to get into Mike's mind and empathise with the terrors he faces.

It's a shame then that all of this good work is undone by a climax which is both confusing and nonsensical given what has come before. Whether it's the dictates of the plot or the studio, it's a dissatisfying ending for one of the strongest horrors Hollywood has produced in some time.

Paul Hurley