The Shining

If we gazed at the instruments of Stanley Kubrick, may we say, in a slightly off beat effort to disregard the magnate for a split second I would clap my hands for Shilley Duvall who gave a bees knees' performance. Most surprisingly, and in a very telepathic way that emulates the movie's, I stumbled upon a comment of hers that complains of how indifferent critics were towards her performance "as if she wasn't there". I don't know why but throughout the film I was impressed by none as I was by her sincerity as she walks the Via Dolorosa watching her son and her husband running amok.  The Shining is Stanley's attempt into unanimity by choosing a crowd pleasing genre like macabre but weaving still his own elements into the fabric of which, thus producing a piece that serves both parties; the audience's and his. Despite the conventional veneer, a director with the complexity and eclectic perfectionism of Kubrick wouldn't smuggle profundity for a trite thriller, he creates something as simple as a "lemon squeezer" but asserts nonetheless that his "juicy was not meant to squeeze but start conversations".  
The deliberateness with which Kubrick nitpicks all his films is very manifest that where it sounds prosaic for hasty viewers it proposes a non-erroneous air like that of HAL, later in his Odyssey, the computer that mocks "human imperfection" in a bitterly pungent tone. The orchestration between the psychological and the supernatural is carried out in such a manner so as to cause perplexity and like the hedge maze it stays away from the straightforward. Why would someone be straightforward and why in the first place people demand the straightforward, if life already has the lion's share of it? When Torrance is told in one of the most genius scenes "you're the caretaker, sir, you've always been the caretaker" by the cabin-fevered Grady, it is as if the viewer is absorbed into the deeper fathoms of the movie. To tell the truth, I was beginning to feel more than once that the film is just another threadbare and well-worn horrify-er when all of a sudden I'm proven wrong by the extra-layered scenes as vast as hotel Overlook annexes. The mysterious picture that looms obliquely in our minds by the end of the movie is a token from Kubrick; one last trail he gives us to follow the whirling smoke of perception so that however common the ghastly must be, Stanley's will always be the finest, never smeared by commercialism.