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Mike Enslin (John Cusack) writes non-fiction books about supposedly haunted places. He doesn’t so much debunk them as report on their history, going so far to spend an evening around the location to see if there’s anything to the local accounts. After houses, castles and graveyards, Enslin is turning his attention to hotels. His P.O. box flooded with brochures, he is amused by the postcard inviting him to New York’s Dolphin Hotel but warning him not to stay in room 1408. Do the math. Further research into the room’s past reveals a number of suicides and the hotel won’t even book him. The hotel’s manager, Mr. Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), does his best to talk Enslin out of it, going so far to offer him subtle bribes and a complete history for his book (including more deaths than originally reported) if he just stays out of that room. “No one has lasted more than an hour,” he says thus establishing maybe the best spook story setup since Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others in 2001.

With trusty tape recorder in hand, Enslin explores the rather bland room. The scariest sight is the price of Beer Nuts. But what’s a good haunting without sounds? And few decibels are more frightening than the dulcet tones of The Carpenters foreboding “We’ve Only Just Begun.” The next 40 minutes is Cusack in a one-man show of enveloping fear as the room begins to play its hand against a man with more demons than he cares to admit.

Such a fantastic setup is almost doomed to find disappointment in what’s to come and 1408 suffers in its lack of revelations. There’s nothing wrong in keeping the origin and motives of the room’s evil to itself, but the screenplay has trouble committing to the deeper psychological underpinnings of the Enslin character. Slowly revealed to have traumatic family relations, we’re still never sold on the possibility that everything is happening in his head even with an early scene so out-of-place it’s destined to make a reappearance just as things as getting interesting. With all the hopped-up drama placed on Enslin’s relationship with his own father are, a major scene encapsulating it falls flat and the subject is dropped. It’s also curious for all the complications involved in keeping the room tidy once a month, it seems as if those sheets really haven’t been changed since the first of the many deaths.

Ruining precisely how things go bump would be spoiling most of the fun of 1408. The usual slamming shut and sudden disquieting aside, 1408 is more creepy than outright scary and much of its success is due to John Cusack’s performance. Praise is long overdue on Cusack as one of our best everyman actors who can convey just enough cynicism and yet still allow an audience to root for him. This is never more evident in the pre-room scenes, particularly those with Jackson, sparring wits with another master of matter-of-fact delivery, but Cusack also sails through the film’s more questionable turns with a command of the situation. For all the additions made to Stephen King’s short story, it’s a shame the screenwriters missed the obvious allegorical connotations to the final decision Enslin is presented with. A stronger metaphor for life in the face of death there could not have been, but I’m satisfied enough with 1408 being a stronger horror film in the face of garbage like Hostel Part II.

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originally posted: 06/22/07 14:00:00
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