1408 could have been a contender. John Cusack is great, even here, and Samuel L. Jackson is hard to beat anywhere. Then there’s the whole Stephen King thing, admittedly a bit of a blessing and a curse, given all the other film adaptations of his work.
The film starts well—Cusack’s character is a cynical, washed-up writer who’s gone from powerful fiction to silly sensationalist books about his visits to various supposedly haunted spots.
We’re given a glimpse into his day-to-day life, as he drives around in the pouring rain, trying to find a small hotel that’s a bit off the beaten path. Once he finds it, he crosses an amazing bridge, gets inside, and is told fact after fact about the hotel when all he really wants is to be alone and get drunk.
After an amusing (but sad) scene featuring a true-to-life book signing, he returns home to California, is enticed by a postcard into starting to investigate a certain room in the Dolphin Hotel, has a nasty surfing accident, and gets his publisher to force the hotel to let him stay in the room.
Samuel L. Jackson is the hotel manager, and does his best to convince Cusack’s character to not stay in the room. But he insists, and is finally escorted to the fourteenth floor (really the thirteenth floor), handed the key, and wished good luck.
The room is completely ordinary, even a bit run down compared to what you might expect from a hotel like the Dolphin. Cusack wanders around, poking at furniture, closets, the minibar. Then things start to get a bit weird—the clock radio goes off, startling him. Chocolates mysteriously appear on the pillow of his now turned-down bed. He chases around after a hotel worker he imagines must have been in the room, with no luck.
The room starts to get uncomfortably warm. A heating engineer explains how to fix it from the door, but won’t come closer, and disappears down the hall as soon as Cusack seems to have things working again. It’s still hot, though, so he opens the window for some air, and it slams shut on his hand. He runs to the bathroom and is scalded by a vicious tap. Then the movie falls apart.
Ghosts appear and disappear (usually after dispatching themselves). The walls crack and bleed. His key breaks off in the door and the doorknob snaps off when he tries to leave. He tries to escape out the window, but all the rest of the windows disappear. Brick walls cover every exit. Time passes. The effects go wild. I was bored stiff. First it seems like there might be one explanation for what’s going, then the filmmakers get bored and something else takes its place. Sometimes they revisit ideas.
There’s some tear-jerking in the form of visions, or flashbacks, or maybe drunken reveries about his married life and his daughter’s death from cancer. His not-really-ex-wife is tempted into the room by a video chat. The sprinklers soak everything. Later, it gets cold. It gets really cold.
The daughter makes an appearance, maybe physically, maybe not. She dies. He decides to take his own life rather than risk losing his ex-wife as well, and manages to set the room on fire. He awakens in the hospital, his ex by his side. They reconcile, decide to move. Was it real? Was it all a dream? The last scene is yet another tease.
So, in the end, the film was a disappointment. It really could have been powerful and interesting had it stuck to one idea—say that the supernatural stuff was real, or maybe that losing his daughter drove him to drink and that led him to hallucinate, or perhaps that surfing is a dangerous thing for someone with undealt with psychological issues. But instead the filmmakers try to have it every which way, along with throwing in every haunted-house trope they’d seen in other films, and the result is a sorry mess.
