The film is about John Cusack, and that’s the good thing about it. The story is not really one of the stories around which you would expect some big-style movie, but as necessary with this kind of adaptation, the screenwriters took liberties and that’s to the benefit of the film. The plot runs you through all kinds of standard openings, standard interim resolutions, standard frights and standard dramas – only to take another twist here or there that is not so very standard, or to be more consequent in spinning the tale than you would expect the average Hollywood produce to be. I saw that there is an alternative ending on some DVD edition, and that shoyuld be interesting, because the ending I saw was one of many conceivable. And the very final shot was pretty lame Hollywood nonsense, to be honest, with a bit of a pretentious whiff when the authors thought they were Kubrick. They are not, of course, but before better ones come along, 1408 is very suitable to bridge the time. Surely one of the better horror films I’ve seen in the last … 10 years? There is actually a little crisis in the market, as I see it: if you don’t slash or poke or torture people, there is little room for real nice ghost story movies. A shame, actually.
thomas4cinema 