 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
  1408By Daniel JohnsonJul 12, 2007 The Tibetan Book of the Dead says we enter a series of rooms after death, called Bardos, where we face our own mind's projections. Depending on the shape of the soul, we could experience anything from bliss to terror, all rendered in the overwhelming vividness of the unchecked imagination. If this is true, it begs the question: are heaven and hell real apart from us, or merely self-created? That thought is central to 1408, director Mikael Hafstrom's adaptation of the story of the same name by Stephen King. In it, John Cusack - in his broadest, most committed performance yet - stars as Mike Enslin, a writer forced to face his own demons after getting trapped in "an evil fucking room." After making a career of non-belief with a series of best-selling travelogues in which he visits the sites of famous hauntings, only to debunk them - the subtext being, of course, that he wants to believe - Enslin, hungry for new material, books room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel spurred on by an anonymous tip. In a scene embarrassing for its transparent exposition, hotel manager Gerald Olin (played woodenly by the increasingly tone-deaf Samuel L. Jackson) gives Enslin the backstory of room 1408; a litany of murders, suicides and more suicides. "No one has ever survived more than an hour," he says, serving up the plot device. When Enslin decides to stay the night anyway, all hell literally breaks loose. Besides Jackson's cameo, there are many unintentionally frightening things in 1408 - Cusack's ubiquitous Hawaiian shirt; Mary McCormack's collagen implants - but none compare to what's in store for Enslin who, after getting spooked and trying to check out, finds he can't and, trapped, rapidly descends into a contained abyss of torment and despair. There are subplots about a dead child and an abusive father that would be irrelevant if they didn't underscore that we all carry the psychological ingredients with us that can be stirred into terror by the wrong events. And this is what works best about 1408's old-fashioned, Hitchcockian approach: the audience supplies its own evil. As the standards for objectionable content lower, and the reach of special effects increases, movies are able to show more, leaving portrayals of sexuality and violence less and less to the imagination. The result is somehow less visceral for it. Modern filmmakers could take note watching Enslin get tortured to the point of madness: nothing is as frightening as what is already in our heads.
|
||