First of all the poster shows two faces, John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, but the movie is all around Cusack, Jackson has a very small part.
It’s about Mike Enslin, who writes stories about haunted houses, haunted hotels, and generally haunted places. He doesn’t believe in any of it, doesn’t believe in God or in a spiritual world or anything remotely supernatural, but he considers himself to be a honest writer, so he wants to spend a night in every place he writes about. Nothing ever happened during those nights, despite all the owners’ tales. One day he receives a postcard of the Dolphin hotel in New York, with ‘don’t enter room 1408’ written on it, or something of that effect. It’s not clear who sent the postcard, but Mike has every intention to write about that room. He phones the hotel but is repeatedly told that room 1408 is not available. He goes there in person, and the hotel manager is called: Olin (Jackson) calls it an “evil room” and he does his best to prevent Mike from entering that room, telling him that 56 people have died in there within an hour, either suicides or natural deaths. Nothing can change his mind though, and Olin can’t help giving him the key of room 1408 if he insists, because there’s a law that forces hotels to rent every free room which respects safety measures.
- of course, one might say, why didn’t Olin pretend that the room was occupied if he didn’t want to rent it, or why didn’t he pretend that something was physically wrong with it and therefore unsafe.. it makes no sense I know. Olin says that the room is kept clean and that the hotel owners want to pretend that there’s nothing wrong in their hotels, but this doesn’t mean that Olin couldn’t pretend that the room was occupied, or unsafe, or whatever, anything honestly would be better than to have another death in the hotel, right?
Mike goes to his room alone, because nobody would enter it. It looks like a very normal, common room at first. The air-conditioning unit appears to be malfunctioning, and the receptionist promptly sends someone up: the man gives him the instructions to repair it himself, refusing to enter the room, then leaves in a hurry.
Soon the first little tricks start: chocolates appear on the pillow, the radio-alarm-clock starts playing music, and he thinks there might be someone in the room but he’s completely alone. He seems to be getting upset but still he doesn’t believe in anything supernatural. When he looks out of the window and it suddenly falls down on his hand, hurting it, things change. He rushes to the bathroom already in a state of mental distress, getting everything dirty with the blood on his hand. The water becomes so hot that he can’t turn it off, meanwhile the clock is running a 60-minutes countdown. He sees the ghosts of two people who died throwing themselves off the window; he has visions of his dying father and his poor young daughter as she was before she died. He’s had more than enough and wants to leave, but he can’t. The phone doesn’t allow him to reach the hotel reception, the key doesn’t work and then it breaks in the lock, and the doorknob falls off; he tries to escape through the air vent but once in there he is attacked (sort of) by some ghost or something that look like a mummy, and when he reaches another room he sees from up there that the woman and child he had heard from room 1408 are his wife and his daughter when she was just a little baby, and then the vents change before his eyes, so he goes back in and tries another way. He looks at the floor map and plans to go to an adjacent room to ask for help by walking close to the wall outside the window, but when he tries and his hand can’t reach any window he sees that there are no more windows on that floor. He is forced to go back in, and now the floor map has changed too, showing only his room, and in the room there are no windows anymore. He tries his cell phone but it has no signal, so he tries wifi using his laptop, and he can get a signal, and he calls his wife Lily, asking her to call the police and send them to room 1408, when suddenly the fire system goes off and the computer gets all wet and stops working. The temperature turns instantly very cold, there’s ice everywhere and he makes a small fire in the room to survive the cold, when the computer starts working again and he receives a call from Lily, rather worried about him, telling him that the police are there but they found the room to be empty! The video-chat starts working by itself, telling Lily to come at once to his room, although the real Mike is shouting for her not to come.
I don’t remember exactly the exact moment when each thing happened, but at some point he breaks the wall trying to reach the adjacent room, and can’t. Then the words “burn me alive” appear on the wall. Then blood starts pouring out from the broken wall.
At some point the paintings change, becoming more sad or more scary, and from the painting representing a sailing ship at sea the water start pouring out flooding the room, and he finds himself on the beach in Los Angeles. We saw him before he went to New York, surfing and falling in the water and almost drowning until he woke up on the beach. It’s the same moment, when he wakes up and he’s in LA and Lily comes to see him because the hospital called her, and they make peace, he tells her about room 1408 and she tells him that he should write about it, not really concerned but acting more like it had only been just a nightmare. During a visit to the post office, Mike recognizes in all the faces there people that he saw at the Dolphin Hotel; they start breaking down the walls, and he finds himself again in room 1408, in rather bad conditions now. He sees little Katy calling him and coming towards him, and if at first he tries to resist saying “you’re not real, you’re not Katy” soon he yields and talks to her and hugs her tight, until she dies again in his arms, and crumbles into dust.
Finally the countdown reaches zero, but the next moment the countdown starts again. The room has been restored to how it was when he entered. The phone rings and he asks the usual voice why the don’t simply kill him, but the voice says that the guests enjoy their free will, and that it’s his own choice, he can relive the same hour over and over again or he can avail himself of their quick “checkout system”, and a noose appear hanging from the roof, and he sees himself in the mirror hanging himself, but he replies that he doesn’t like that solution, and he wants to choose his own exit. He uses the rest of the bottle Olin had given him to create a molotov bomb. At first he had suspected that he had been drugged thru that drink but he didn’t stop drinking it. Now he puts some cloth into the bottle, lit it and throws it at the wall, setting the room instantly on fire.
Nothing of what had happened before had concerned the rest of the hotel, but now the fire alarm sounds and the hotel is evacuated so when Lily arrives she can’t enter. He breaks a window causing the fire to burst, and he lies on the floor when two firemen arrive to take him out to safety.
We see Olin in his office saying to himself “Well done Mr Enslin”... and it all seems just too simple.
He is saved, taken to a hospital where Lily visits him, and they go back to their house.
I don’t know, there were a few good moments but not many. Before realizing his tragic past, honestly Mike appeared to be a jerk, so unpleasant when talking to Olin, so arrogant, and then when things went wrong he cursed him as if it had been Olin’s plan when he actually had tried his best to prevent him from going in there - well he had tried to convince him, but as I said before he could have prevented him had he really wanted to.
I don’t remember when it happened exactly, if before or after hurting his hand, but there was a moment when he wanted to leave and couldn’t, and he saw the figure of a man in a room across his own, and tried to shout for help. At first the figure didn’t react, then it started doing exactly what he was doing, copying his every move like a mirror, and when he took a lamp in his hand and the figure did too he saw that the face was his own, and he saw a man trying to kill him and turning around the same man was in his own room attacking him, and then disappearing. That was rather effective, when I still thought it might actually be rather interesting and frightening, but it didn’t last long.
At the end, we see Mike and Lily at home, and when she wants to throw away the things the brought back from the hotel he takes his recorder, and playing it back they both hear Katy’s voice, meaning that he didn’t dream it, that it actually happened.
Now, if everything that happened in there was real, then the room really got frozen, flooded, broken, everything was real and yet the room was able to reset itself to its normal condition without the rest of the hotel noticing anything.. why couldn’t the room do the same when he set the fire? Because this time it had been Mike’s doing not the room’s.. and yet he had spread water, broken walls and windows, and the room turned to normal. Why was this fire different?
If everything that had happened had been just hallucinations, then how come Lily heard Katy’s voice?
I’m sorry but I found it made no sense, and therefore I was not frightened and the ending left me bored and unsatisfied.
I wonder if that’s how King wrote it, if that’s his ending too. It could be, I don’t know.
Tony Shalhoub has a little scene in the movie, he was like his editor or something.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento