Fifty-six people have died in room 1408, explains Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), the manager of the Dolphin hotel, to Mike Enslin (John Cusack). Olin, in his efforts to dissuade Enslin from staying in the room for an evening, provides him with a thick photo album containing pictures of the more gruesome deaths, the ones that weren’t the result of ‘natural causes’. Enslin doesn’t buy the story, however, because in a bit of irony the writer responsible for such paranormal best sellers as Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Hotel Rooms is a skeptic. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, poltergeists, or haunted hotels, and thinks that they are simply the product of hotel managers trying to bump bookings when interstate roads reroute business away from them.
Undaunted by Olin’s ominous warnings, Mike Enslin journeys into room 1408. From the very beginning, Enslin is faced with bizarre occurrences and frightening images. Skeptic that he is, Enslin at first attempts to explain what is happening to him by reasoning out logical solutions, periodically pausing to dictate his thoughts into a small tape recorder. But as the events grow more frightening and hazardous to Enslin’s health, he abandon’s the idea that what he is witnessing is staged and decides that it’s time to get out. The room, predictably, works to prevent that from happening.
The film is directed by Mikael HÃ¥fström and plays more or less like a typical haunted house genre movie. There’s a couple of problems with the film, however, that keep it from being as good as it could be.
The first problem is that John Cusack feels like the wrong actor for this role. The character of Mike Enslin is a broken man at the start of this movie; a guy who is a cynic and skeptic, who has lost his faith in God due to personal tragedies in his life. He doesn’t even believe his own writing, and comes across as a fraud. Enslin doesn’t feel like a guy we should be rooting for.
Cusack, on the other hand, is an actor who is instantly likable in anything he does. Because of that, it’s really difficult to buy him as a broken-down cynic. The movie is basically Enslin vs. The Room, and because Cusack is so likable we’re rooting for him from the get-go. But the story would have been more effective if Enslin would have been someone we didn’t initially like. If we could witness Enslin transform over the course of the film from a broken-down cynic into a man who gets his faith back via the difficult encounter with the room, it would have been a powerful makeover to witness and would have given the film some much needed weight. As it is, the film comes across as thin and Cusack’s character actually seems to lose dimensionality as the story progresses. It’s not often that a main character such as Mike Enslin is actually more interesting at the beginning of the movie than at the end.
The other problem with the film is that the writers and director opt for the cheap horror movie parlor trick toward the end. I don’t want to give too much away, despite the disappointment here, but what the filmmakers pull is a variation on the age old “is it real, or is it a dream?” trick, which creates an unnecessary layer of ambiguity that only serves to cheapen the previous 90 minutes of storytelling and reduce the impact of the film’s final scene. The movie would have been better with such theatrical gadgets left on the cutting room floor.
The film isn’t a complete waste of time, but it’s not anywhere close to being as good as it could have been had the creators simply taken a more straightforward approach to storytelling and left the parlor tricks for the lesser horror fare like Halloween and Friday the 13th. What happens in the room is, at times, genuinely chilling. A better movie would have stayed on point and pitted Enslin’s cynicism against the room’s terror until there was a clear winner.