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The fatal check-in

Finally, a good version of a Stephen King story
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 17th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
These walls have fears. John Cusack wants only to check out of 1408.
1408

Directed by Mikael Hafstrom
With John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack and Tony Shalhoub

Writer Mike Enslin is a private ghost story-buster. After one promising novel, the author finds himself churning out such guidebooks as The Fifty Most Haunted Hotels in New England, where he provides added PR for small country inns and village hostels that claim to keep spirits on the premises.
Enslin doesn’t believe in ghosts, and can quickly and logically dismiss the moans and rappings erupting around him in any given inn. Yet the public’s hunger for wanting a bit of ectoplasm with room service is enough to keep him cynically writing guides to these two-star tourist traps. He’s just giving the readers what they want, developing a healthy case of contempt for them in the process.
Then he stays in 1408.
Lured to the Hotel Dolphin in Manhattan by a mysterious postcard, Enslin (John Cusack) insists on booking the room number written on the postcard: 1408. The hotel insists, however, that the room is unavailable. With the help of his publisher, Sam Farrell (Tony Shalhoub), Enslin finds a legal means by which the hotel cannot lawfully keep him from booking the room.
The Dolphin’s manager, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), meets with Enslin to dissuade him from going ahead with his plan, explaining to the writer that the room has been the site of numerous murders, suicides and acts of self-mutilation.
Enslin believes this is all a ploy on Olin’s part to get his hotel in his next guide. “It’s an evil room,” Olin says gravely, and, at first, after forcing Olin to comply with his demand, Enslin agrees. “Eight dollars for beer nuts?” he quips after seeing the room’s mini-bar. “This room is evil.” From then on, however, the room will have its own say in the matter.
There’s a nice symmetry in the fact that 1408 is the strongest film based on horror work by Stephen King since Kubrick’s The Shining, itself hotel-bound. A few films from King’s less supernatural writing have made decent screen adaptations (Misery, Stand By Me), but the author hasn’t much benefited from the less than chilling versions of Cujo and Christine, with their demonic St. Bernard and malevolent Plymouth Fury. 1408, however, makes up for everything since 1980, when Jack Torrance allowed a hotel to drive him mad.
That is not to say that director Mikael Hafstrom is Kubrick’s equal, or that his film is The Shining redux (though Hafstrom throws in a nice red-room nod at the top). But 1408 is stylishly done, and Hafstrom knows how to create and sustain tension. The film mostly belongs to Cusack, as for the greater part of the story it is him alone against the room. It’s a tour de force for the actor, and Cusack is at the top of his game. His hardened, sardonic Enslin will be compelled to transform himself physically, psychologically and spiritually if he’s to check out alive, and Cusack makes his character’s journey nothing less than riveting.
Jackson, finally freed from battling snakes on a plane, is solid in his small role, as is Mary McCormack as Enslin’s estranged wife, for whom room 1408 will also serve as a snare.
Interestingly, the ending that European audiences are seeing is not the one that Americans got. Here, 1408’s conclusion is uncomfortably ambiguous. Though laced with a few stale “is it only a dream” plot devices, the film finally hints at something quite sinister, and refreshingly cynical.
That ending was tried out on Stateside viewers, who found it be a “downer” — which is to say, it didn’t fit comfortably with that nation’s Manichaean world view. Rather than battle this Sunday-school need for goodness to triumph, a new ending proffering uplift was grafted on instead.
It’s another nice symmetry. Like Enslin’s guidebooks prior to his arrival at the hellish Dolphin Hotel, Hafstrom contemptuously threw a sop to the popcorn class. In this version, however, he’s allowed us to be hit with the full force of 1408’s power, with no “do not disturb” signs to shield us.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (17/10/2007):

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