This adaptation of a Stephen King short story starts out with laudable intentions of eschewing the current fade for gory torture-based horror and returning the genre to the city-bound paranoia of, say, Polanski at his most claustrophobic. Setting most of the action in a single room of a supposedly haunted Manhattan hotel, writers Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander do a fine job of spinning out King's simple idea with images and set-pieces that recall the high watermark of such horror landmarks as "Rosemary's Baby", "The Tenant" and "Repulsion". But Polanski's horror cinema was usually rooted in the everyday -- exploring cracked minds and the collapsing sanity of his protagonists through the external Gothic metaphor of decaying Parisian attic rooms and the splitting walls of gloomy London apartment buildings. "1408" often puts some of these images to use once again most effectively, and John Cusack is presented with an actor's dream: getting to spend most of the movie on his own (without the annoying distraction of other actors clogging up his screen time) in a single set, acting his tiny socks off! The difference here is that King's attitude to the supernatural is far more traditional than Polanski's. Usually there is a rather pat "moral" to his ghostly tales and it usually revolves around the hoary old notion that losing faith with a capital F leads to a general, enervating cynicism and the mother of a mid-life crisis.
Cusack plays Mike Enslin, author of a series of best-selling guides to the supernatural. After years spent trawling round flea-pit tourist trap hotels, supposedly in search of ghosts, poltergeists and other goings-on of a spooky nature, Enslin is well and truly burned-out and has no belief left in the supernatural hoopla he's been cynically selling his readers for years. The early scenes establish Enslin's rut: a life spent desperately trying to occupy himself in decidedly humble and quite unhaunted motels, and addressing sparse audiences at arid book signing sessions. When he receives an anonymous post card from the Dolphin hotel warning him not to stay in room 1408, Enslin sniffs a nice close to the final chapter of his latest book. The manager of the hotel seems most reluctant to let him stay in that particular room, but Enslin suspects merely nothing more sinister than a clever marketing scam on behalf of the hotel owners. Even when duty manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) gives him an omminously thick file relating the details of 54 deaths -- both natural and "unatural" -- that have all occured in the same room, the author is, if anything, only more determined to stay there.
After this big lead up, most of the rest of the film then takes place in the unexceptionally furnished hotel room of the title. The Dolphin is a large city hotel of tasteful but grand Art Deco design, and Enslin starts out observing the numbing banality of the room with its generic paintings and bland furnishings, indistinguishable from most of the other rooms in the hotel. But needless to say, pretty soon even Enslin starts to realise that something pretty strange is afoot -- and not just because of the fact that he is being persistently tortured by a constant bombardment of The Carpenters' middle of the road classic, "We've Only Just Begun"!
Director, Mikael Hafstrom ("Derailed") handles this section of the film with aplomb and Cusack gets to have a ball with his character's fairly rapid transformation from blasé hack into terrified wreck of a man. The screenplay deftly juggles the (at first) mildly unsettling scares (weird noises, lavatory towels in the bathroom rearranging themselves, creepy woman with a pram and mewling baby next door, etc.) with some cleverly written development of the Enslin character. This "evil fucking room" (as Jackson's character describes it) begins mercilessly using Enslin's tortured past against him. Soon the loss of a child and Enslin's withdrawal and separation from his wife, are put forward as the "explanation" for his lack of belief in God or the supernatural (fairly standard clichés but expertly woven in nonetheless), and his uneasy relationship with his father (exploited in one of his early novels) returns to haunt him. There are one or two very memorable moments, not least being the creepy scene when Enslin notices a distant figure in the adjacent block of apartments, and attempts to contact him for help. This is a sequence, incidentally, which reminded me strongly of a sequence in Dario Argento's "Inferno" (another classic horror film mostly set in a large hotel), although whether this reference was deliberate I do not know.
The final act is where the film seems to lose its nerve somewhat and, as though to justify its status, lets loose with a cavalcade of large-scale over-the-top special effects and over-egged shocks. Enslin is also (apparently) let out of the claustrophobic confines of the hotel room, as though the screenwriters couldn't quite trust their central idea enough to let things play out in one room for a whole film and so give themselves a get-out clause, just in case. The ending is unnecessarily BIG and the intimacy and thoughtfulness in the early sections of the film soon get lost under the noise and bluster, with sentimentality also threatening to swamp things at any moment. Despite this, the film is a worthwhile antedote to the glut of gore-based horrors and vapid remakes of Japanese ghost stories, which still dominate the market.
The Paramount DVD features a commentary track from the director and writers that gives an interesting account of the problems of adaptation, while the other extras are fairly prosaic video sound bites from an interview with John Cusack, which don't tell us anything we wouldn't have realised for ourselves just from actually watching the film! "1408" is by no means an all time classic, but is still a worthy addition to the ever growing cannon of King film adaptations.
