Yes, I know that the film is considered a cult and according to polls for some reason is included in the lists of the best films of all time and that one should almost pray to Kubrick. Now I'm gonna beat him up.
There is such a concept of suspense - delaying long alarming plans on frightened faces, as well as all sorts of doors, kettles, mirrors and all this with a background ringing slurk. You can show the doorknob, hanger, hamster for 2 minutes - and it is already scary. On this effect alone, the entire film is built, lasting 2 hours and 20 minutes. There is nothing more to it, especially logic. So, there is an elite hotel, where 4 presidents and several kings are deigned to stay, and the hosts hire for it as a winter watchman who? Street people! Smoking hysterics and Satan-obsessed 5-year-old. Without conducting any psychological testing, without examining the medical history (from which you would know about alcoholism immediately). How can two adults guarantee the engineering safety of a huge building in extreme climatic conditions for six months? In theory, the building should be entrusted to the local forestry or some society, a small factory or scientists who just need the building for the winter and could guarantee the care of it. So the movie starts with this big hole that I said, "I don't believe."
Next. In the film there are telepaths, but they did nothing, the Negro half-film went to the mental call of the boy, barely appearing in the building, got an axe under the ribs and was so. There are ghosts in the film, but some are lazy and clearly do not act out themselves. There seems to be a topic of crazy people, but there is zero psychology in it. The theme of selling the soul started, but it stopped. As a result, we immediately have a bunch of horror stamps, none of which reveals itself. Jack meets a crowd of people in an empty bar and how does he react? No way. Kissing in the bathroom with a stranger who turns out to be a dead old woman, and then what? Nothing. "Honey, there's no one in the bathroom." It's absolutely fine! On what grounds did a man suddenly want to kill his wife? Just because he talked in the bathroom with the ghost of the previous maniac, he did not even receive instructions from him, they just talked about the empty and that's it! The final scene – a devil-possessed father running with an axe after a devil-possessed son – WHY should I empathize with the second, not the first? Personally, I believe that this whole family of freaks should be used up, for the benefit of humanity, but no, the authors decided to defend the right to live for the minted child ... the right to sleepwalk with a huge knife, repeating the word "redrum", to mock the mother, to see bloody hallucinations, to talk with your own finger. Well, it's for him to grow up and kill more people. Drammatism - well, you are experiencing it. . .
To sum up, the horror movie doesn’t work because all the characters were crazy before they got to the hotel and would kill each other anywhere. The ghosts who lived in the house did nothing to destroy them, because the characters themselves coped with it wonderfully. Thus, this is the only film about how the evil forces silently and frightenedly stuck with the people they sent.