Written by: Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski (screenplay), Stephen King (short story)
Directed by: Mikael Håfström
Starring: John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer
Plot
A paranormal skeptic stays in a haunted hotel room.n.
Verdict
This creates a great mood with plenty of unsettling scenes, but the character and his background is cliche. This feels like a budget homage to The Shining (1980), and that's not a compliment. Instead of a haunted house, this is a haunted room. The great premise comes up short with an unsatisfying conclusion.
Skip it.
Review
Mike Enslin (John Cusack) doesn't believe in haunted houses, but visits them anyway to generate stories for his haunted places book.
A mysterious post card leads him the Dolphin Hotel and room 1408. The hotel manager (Samuel L. Jackson) tries to talk him out of staying, even bribing him, but Mike is intent despite the fifty-six deaths that have occurred in the room. Jackson plays the character well, but it doesn't feel like a real person would act that way. He keeps a dossier of all the deaths in the room?
1408 does a great job of making the mood creepy. Strange things occur, but Mike tries to explain it away. His explanations quickly fall short. It starts small and slowly builds with a few jump scares, but the best moments are the small moments. You don't know the extent of the room. Mike has a single window to the outside world, but even when he throws a lamp out the window it disappears in mid air. There is a great moment where Mike sees a person through a window in the building across the street. The person's face is obscured and Mike slowly realizes he's looking into a mirror. The other person, mimicking his movements.
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| 1408 - A great premise yet squandered potential. |
A great ending could really make this movie, instead it goes in a few different directions and all of them are ineffective. We get the it was all just a dream trope before things start repeating and it turns into a dream within a dream. Mike never left room 1408.
The Netflix ending is the first alternate ending. That is what's on the DVD release. It's not the ending shown in theaters. In the theater ending, Mike is rescued by firefighters and reconciles with his ex-wife. He regards the experience as a bad dream until he finds his tape recorder which proves the experience was real.
This ending sounds better than the Netflix conclusion, a muddled mess with no impact and a cheap jump scare. Paring down the scope to a single room is a good move, but the writing betrays this.
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