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Relying on psychological tension rather than overt violence and gore, 1408 is a genuinely creepy thriller with a strong lead performance by John Cusack.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Mikael Håfström

John Cusack

Mike Enslin

Samuel L. Jackson

Mary McCormack

Jasmine Anthony

Tony Shalhoub

Sam Farrell

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Any film that uses the Carpenters' pop hit "We've Only Just Begun" for scares instead of sentimentality must be credited with a quirky sense of humor.

By Stephen Farber

Stephen Farber

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This review was written for the theatrical release of “1408.” 

Release date: Nov 30, 1999

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Actually, he turns a little too quickly into a hysteric begginAny film that uses the Carpenters’ pop hit “We’ve Only Just Begun” for scares instead of sentimentality must be credited with a quirky sense of humor. The presence of John Cusack in the cast — actually, he’s almost the entire cast — confirms the movie’s hip, humorous approach to the horror genre.

“1408” is adapted from a Stephen King short story that bears some similarities to his famous novel “The Shining,” though it probably won’t duplicate the boxoffice success of Stanley Kubrick’s film. Like “The Shining,” this chamber piece is set in a haunted hotel. Cusack plays Mike Enslin, a jaded writer who traffics in trashy books about cursed locales. Although he plays up to his gullible readers, he clearly doesn’t buy into the supernatural trappings that he cynically exploits. But when he checks into room 1408 of New York’s Dolphin Hotel, the terrifying happenings quickly turn a scoffer into a believer.

Other films like “The Shining” or the Robert Wise version of “The Haunting” have confined the characters as well as the viewers to a single setting. But those films featured rather spacious, grandiose haunted houses, whereas most of “1408” takes place in just two rooms of an otherwise benign hotel. Hafstrom and his technical team do wonders with altering the dimensions of the suite, introducing all kinds of physical threats — fires, floods and ghostly apparitions — within the minimalist set.

Some of these threats are psychological, as well. It turns out that Mike is still trying to come to terms with a family tragedy, and the room seems able to call up his personal demons as well as all the vengeful force of the natural world. Cusack manages to summon deep wellsprings of personal grief along with breezy humor and naked animal terror. It’s a tour de force performance that confirms the talents of this remarkably versatile, sometimes underrated actor.

The film also deserves praise for going against the grain of today’s grisly, sadistic horror films. Although it’s a lot bloodier than 1963’s “The Haunting,” it’s hardly in the same violent league as the “Saw” and “Hostel” movies that seem to be in fashion today. Audiences who wouldn’t dream of seeing one of those movies might be tickled by this film’s PG-13 scares, though teens who love more graphic gore will find this a little too mild for their tastes.

Even with its flaws, however, “1408” deserves to be appreciated by connoisseurs of acting and bravura filmmaking.

1408 MGM Dimension Films Credits: Director: Mikael Hafstrom Screenwriters: Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski Based on the short story by: Stephen King Producer: Lorenzo di Bonaventura Executive producers: Jake Myers, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein Director of photography: Benoit Delhomme Production designer: Andrew Laws Music: Gabriel Yared Costume designer: Natalie Ward Editor: Peter Boyle Cast: Mike Enslin: John Cusack Gerald Olin: Samuel L. Jackson Lily Enslin: Mary McCormack Sam Farrell: Tony Shalhoub Katie Enslin: Jasmine Jessica Anthony Father: Len Cariou Running time — 102 minutes MPAA rating: PG-13

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Common sense media reviewers.

Hotel room horror is more mental than physical.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Cynical writer learns to cope with grief and guilt

A surfer is hit by a wave and sinks underwater, th

Dead bodies in a tub appear very briefly undressed

Moderate language, used in frustration and fear. O

Dell laptop, Yahoo email.

Mike drinks frequently (cognac, hotel liquor bottl

Parents need to know that this horror film is more about psychology than gore, though the main character, Mike, does sustain some bloody injuries from the various attacks on him (flying furniture, collapsing architecture, and more). He also suffers increasing emotional distress and irrationality, remembering both his…

Positive Messages

Cynical writer learns to cope with grief and guilt through supernatural experiences; much of the movie takes place in a room described as "evil."

Violence & Scariness

A surfer is hit by a wave and sinks underwater, then appears unconscious on shore; some brutal violence is indicated in newspaper and file photos (bodies are bloody, dead by suicides -- including drowning, throat slicing, gun shots, and hanging). A couple of ghosts jump out of the hotel room window (woman screams as she falls); hand smashed by window bleeds (bloody smears on walls, in sink, on shower curtain); man almost falls off building ledge; room "assaults" Mike, first overheating, then freezing, then collapsing, crashing, bleeding, and burning.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Dead bodies in a tub appear very briefly undressed (not explicit); bikinis and swimwear on beach.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Moderate language, used in frustration and fear. One "f--k," plus repeated uses of "s--t," "ass," "damn," "hell," and a few of "bastard," "a--hole," and "bitch."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Mike drinks frequently (cognac, hotel liquor bottles); Mike thinks he's been "dosed." Mike's mirror image smokes; a former smoker, he ritually keeps a cigarette near him so he might use it if necessary -- by film's end, he does.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this horror film is more about psychology than gore, though the main character, Mike, does sustain some bloody injuries from the various attacks on him (flying furniture, collapsing architecture, and more). He also suffers increasing emotional distress and irrationality, remembering both his young daughter, who died of a disease (scenes show the wasting girl and arguments between her parents), and his resentful, despairing, wheelchair-bound father. The nightmare-style narrative is illogical and sometimes disturbing, including ghosts, loud noises, jump scenes, and grotesque images of insects and bloody corpses. Mike drinks frequently and smokes once (very dramatically). Language includes one use of "f--k" and plenty of other words: "s--t," "ass," "bitch," etc. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (7)
• Kids say (36)

Based on 7 parent reviews

Good psychological horror

Really eerie, what's the story.

Stephen King makes a good living writing about scary things and places. He also writes frequently about what it feels like to write about scary things and places. 1408, based on one of King's short stories, is sort of a mix of both. Mike ( John Cusack ) is depressed about what he does for a living. He writes cheesy, repetitive "ghostly" travel books ( 10 Haunted Hotels , 10 Haunted Lighthouses ); he researches them by spending nights in supposedly haunted rooms, then produces rote manuscripts that appeal to unimaginative readers (his disdain for his audience is revealed during a public reading attended by a few dimwitted fans). Mike's frustration and cynicism come to a head when an anonymous postcard writer challenges him to stay in room 1408 of Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel -- which has produced more than 50 corpses over the decades. When the management refuses to let him, Mike gets curious, eventually muscling his way in via legal threats and generally obnoxious behavior. He's warned off by earnest manager Mr. Olin (a very subdued Samuel L. Jackson ), who insists it's not because he cares about Mike but because he doesn't "want to clean up the mess." But Mike thinks he's seen it all ("I know that ghoulies and ghosties don't exist") and takes the room.

Is It Any Good?

If you've read or seen The Shining , you've probably seen it all, too -- or at least what goes on in this room. Considerably more claustrophobic than that story's Overlook Hotel -- it is, after all, set in just one room -- 1408 nonetheless deploys the same gimmicks: cracked, bloody walls; babies crying; ghosts in emotional disarray; and flashbacks to distressing personal history (in this case, Mike's daughter, dead of a disease that makes her very pale and dark-eyed). Mike actually feels bad about a number of family traumas, including having abandoned his wife Lily ( Mary McCormack ) in order to drown his misery in sad-sack drinking, beach-bumming, and lazy writing.

The room locks Mike inside and then proceeds to bring all of his roiling emotions to the surface, sometimes very cleverly but more often very tediously (a window smashes his hand, the room turns hot and cold, the walls collapse, the room changes temporal dimensions, etc.). The room's most deliciously perverse (and always jarring) assault is the clock radio's auto-turn-on, which repeatedly blares the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." But even better, when Mike looks out a window to a room across the street hoping to signal for help, he sees a mirror version of himself -- dressed differently, unspeaking, apparently from another time. Unable to communicate with himself, Mike discovers that he is, after all, quite stunningly alone. Such moments grant Cusack a chance to disintegrate subtly rather than raging about in a spooky-horror-filmy fashion, and he takes full advantage of the opportunity.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the enduring appeal of ghost stories and haunted house tales. Why are they so popular? Do you think strong emotions can continue to "occupy" a place? How does the movie make room 1408 seem scary before viewers even see the inside? How does Mike's past become part of the room's arsenal of disturbing imagery? Families can also discuss why people like being scared at the movies. What makes some horror movies better at accomplishing this than others?

Movie Details

• In theaters : June 21, 2007
• On DVD or streaming : October 2, 2007
• Cast : John Cusack , Mary McCormack , Samuel L. Jackson
• Director : Mikael Hafstrom
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : MGM/UA
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 94 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic material including disturbing sequences of violence and terror, frightening images and language.
• Last updated : October 31, 2023

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1408 (2007)

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One can only imagine, with horror, what would happen if a guest asked for more towels at the Hotel Dolphin, the locale of the freakily scary "1408," yet another film that puts "hostile" back in hostelry. While it's certainly been the season for hotel/motel movies -- see "Bug," "Vacancy" and "Sympathy" -- helmer Mikael ("Derailed") Hafstrom's take on single-room occupancy is the most cinematically ambitious.

By John Anderson

John Anderson

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One can only imagine, with horror, what would happen if a guest asked for more towels at the Hotel Dolphin, the locale of the freakily scary “1408,” yet another film that puts “hostile” back in hostelry. While it’s certainly been the season for hotel/motel movies — see “Bug,” “Vacancy” and “Sympathy” — helmer Mikael (“Derailed”) Hafstrom’s take on single-room occupancy is the most cinematically ambitious. For star John Cusack, it’s a perfect fit and, with a little massaging from the Weinstein Co., should emerge as one of the surprise hits of the summer.

An unnerving movie that here and there succumbs to fits of effects mania, “1408” actually manages to combine elements of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit,” “The Poseidon Adventure” and the Carpenters — making them all more terrifying than they already are. More remarkably, perhaps, “1408” refuses to embrace the fashionable elements of torture porn, a la “Hostel: Part II,” that are currently cutting a bloody swath through the horror genre, relying largely on psychological terror to impart the sense of someone possibly going mad, and taking the viewer along.

Popular on Variety

In Stephen King’s merrily warped world, the most damning thing a character can do is ignore the supernatural writing on the wall. As seen in novels like “The Shining” or short stories like “The Road Virus Heads North,” a character who displays hubris or cynicism, or simply fails to acknowledge life’s mysteries, usually consigns himself to the author’s pile of victims.

Mike Enslin (Cusack), therefore, is the perfect foil for King the moral instructor: A successful writer of popular books about haunted houses and possessed graveyards, Mike scoffs at anything remotely paranormal, but, having lost a daughter to illness, he doesn’t quite believe in anything else, either. Cusack’s charmingly iconoclastic persona helps set Mike up for a lesson in metaphysical manners. By the end of “1408,” he will definitely believe in something.

The Dolphin (which, coincidentally or not, is also the name of a haunted hotel in the Haruki Murakami novel “Dance Dance Dance”) is a luxury establishment on Manhattan’s East Side, a first-rate joint save for one room. Determined to debunk the mystery of room 1408, Mike has to threaten a lawsuit to gain access to the room, where he knows four people have met unlikely ends. What he doesn’t know is that 50-odd people have actually died there, some of apparently natural causes, although the room also once drove a maid to gouge out her eyes. The official diagnosis? It’s an evil room, says Dolphin manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson).

But Mike is undeterred and, once he gets in, finds the room has bizarre shape-shifting properties. While Hafstrom eventually turns 1408 into a frozen tomb that cracks and shifts like an arctic ice shelf, it’s in the smaller details that the creepiness escalates: The closeup of the old-fashioned lock mechanism as Mike inserts the key — the room itself having refused any security improvements — is a little gem of tension-building.

Cusack, given plenty of room to ruminate about his plight and the state of his accommodations, is funny, tragic and moving — as if things weren’t bad enough, his dead daughter Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony) pays him a visit, while his estranged wife Lily (Mary McCormack) tries to help him via a computer screen that’s been taken over by the resident incubus. Make that inn-cubus. “1408” is a creepshow that delivers, although viewers may have second thoughts about ordering room service.

Production values, spearheaded by Benoit Delhomme’s excellent cinematography, are indispensable in this tale of illusion and delusion.

• Production: An MGM release of a Dimension Films presentation of a Lorenzo di Bonaventura production. Produced by di Bonaventura. Executive producers, Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, Jake Myers, Richard Saperstein. Directed by Mikael Hafstrom. Screenplay, Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski, based on the story by Stephen King.
• Crew: Camera (Technicolor, Panavision widescreen), Benoit Delhomme; editor, Peter Boyle; music, Gabriel Yared; production designer, Andrew Laws; art director, Stuart Kearns; set decorator, Marina Morris; costume designer, Natalie Ward; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/DTS), Brian Simmons; supervising sound editor/designer Nigel Mills; special effects supervisor, Paul Corbould; visual effects supervisors, Sean H. Farrow, Uel Hormann, Matt Hicks, Adam Gascoyne, Stefan Drury, Simon Leech; visual effects, the Moving Picture Co., Rainmaker Animation and Visual Effects U.K., Lipsync Post, Senate Visual Effects, Baseblack Visual Effects; stunt coordinator, Paul Herbert; associate producers, Kelly Dennis, Antonia Kalmacoff, Jeremy Steckler; assistant director, Sean Cameron Guest; second unit director, John Greaves; casting, Elaine Grainger. Reviewed at Culver Plaza Theater, Culver City, June 8, 2007. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 94 MIN.
• With: Mike Enslin - John Cusack Gerald Olin - Samuel L. Jackson Lily Enslin - Mary McCormack Katie Enslin - Jasmine Jessica Anthony

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Time Out says

Stephen King, the author of this source material, has already done haunted hotels. So the idea of stretching what was simply supposed to be a dessert course (a short story in King’s 2000 audiobook Blood and Smoke ) to a full meal speaks more to Hollywood appetites than the proper dictates of drama. The tale is skimpy, mostly set in a New York City suite that, despite its bustling midtown location, is said to host unspeakable evil—and it doesn’t even have Wi-Fi.

But as shown by Piper Laurie in Carrie and Kathy Bates in Misery, King’s work can often inspire wonderfully unhinged turns from actors smart enough to be in on the joke. And that’s the case with 1408, in which John Cusack uncorks one of his most verbal, manic performances to date as a ghost debunker who fearlessly checks into the room to write a final chapter in his latest bestseller-to-be. Cusack, comfortable in ironic Hawaiian shirt and curled lip, excels during the film’s initial you-gotta-be-kidding phase; he’s even better by the time his character is screaming deranged insults into a minibar. Swedish director Mikael Hfstrm ultimately lays on the CGI too thick, but when he trusts his star, who fully dives into psychological meltdown, he’s on to something. (Opens Fri; Click here for venues.) — Joshua Rothkopf

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Movie Review | '1408'

An Unlucky Number

By Jeannette Catsoulis

• June 21, 2007

A troubled writer, a haunted hotel room — who else but Stephen King? In "1408," adapted from a 2002 short story by Mr. King, John Cusack is the hack who drags his emotional baggage to Room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in Manhattan, accommodations whose history of grisly deaths demands investigation. Once there, he learns that checking out might not be an option.

Directed by Mikael Hafstrom with old-fashioned restraint and a stylish use of intense close-ups, "1408" is more psychological thriller than outright horror. Recycling many of Mr. King's familiar motifs, the story traps its protagonist in an apparitional loop filled with repeating signs of occult infestation: a Carpenters song bursting from a bedside radio, paintings that tilt and transform. The movie is most effective in its early scenes of prickly menace, and while the Dolphin is no Overlook (the haunted hotel in "The Shining"), its old-world creepiness is exactly right.

Mr. King is a writer who excels at finding malevolence in the mundane, and consequently his tortured Everymen have often been more successful on the small screen than on the large. Mr. Cusack's character descends directly from David Soul's in "Salem's Lot": scarred heroes who have lost their faith. In Mr. Cusack's case, it's waiting for him behind the door of 1408.

"1408" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The hero faces fire, flood, vertigo and assorted supernatural entities.

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Mikael Hafstrom; written by Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, based on a short story by Stephen King; director of photography, Benoît Delhomme; edited by Peter Boyle; production designer, Andrew Laws; produced by Lorenzo de Bonaventura; released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Dimension Films. Running time: 94 minutes.

WITH: John Cusack (Mike Enslin), Samuel L. Jackson (Gerald Olin), Mary McCormack (Lily Enslin) and Jasmine Jessica Anthony (Gracie Enslin).

1408 Review

31 Aug 2007

There’s been a distinct paucity of ghouls, goblins and ghosties in horror of late. While we’ve been treated to plenty of shocks à la buzz saw, thanks to the current wave of torture-porn, it’s been a while since all hell literally broke loose to satisfying effect.

1408 goes a long way to redressing that balance. Based on a short story by Stephen King, the original monarch of menace, it’s an inspired, white-knuckle chill-ride with old-school leanings.

The tale, first released as an audiobook in 2000, follows Mike Enslin (John Cusack), a man with a troubled family history who writes pulpy ghost guides. He replays the same ritual: checking into a supposedly ghost-infested hotel room, a single cigarette tucked behind his ear, and waiting until dawn. He’s given up the habit, but carries the smoke with him, the sole concession of a sceptic that there might be something out there, and that one night he’ll meet it. And sure enough, in Room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel, that cigarette finally gets sparked.

Essentially, this is a one-man show: for most of the run-time, once Enslin enters 1408, it’s just a guy reacting to four walls and some furniture. In John Cusack’s hands, though, it becomes a lot more. It’s his first foray into the chilly mind-corridors of horror (unless you count psycho-thriller Identity), and he attacks it with impressive energy.

His Enslin starts cynical, pale as a ghost himself and haunted by memories; once the real haunting begins, he unravels before our eyes. Rather than ham it up, Cusack, a master of understatement, plays it cool and quiet, so when he does freak out, it’s all the more powerful.

Speaking of understatement, Samuel L. Jackson dials down his usual shouty schtick in a small role as the spooky hotel’s spookier manager. An effective early scene sees him plead with Enslin to stay away from the cursed 14th floor, producing grisly photos of earlier victims and delivering a one-liner that’s sure to become classic Jackson: “It’s an evil fucking room.” His other appearance, later on in the movie, doesn’t work so well, an unintentionally comical use of special effects that comes off like a deleted scene from Ghostbusters.

In fact, one niggle that can be raised is that the film gets swamped unnecessarily with CGI towards the end. Just as Kubrick’s take on The Shining cut out the supernatural animal topiaries, the makers of 1408 have excised some of King’s more colourful paranormal flourishes (adieu, woodcut wolf). Even so, the later, big-scale set-pieces don’t work as well as the early, squirmy jolts of fear as the room starts to turn on Enslin.

Proving you don’t need piles of body parts to make a scary movie, director Mikael Håfström wrings unease out of everyday guest-house items - chocolates left on a turned-down bed, an antique thermostat, the ominous red glow of an alarm clock. Once it’s set up, the frankly ridiculous duel - one man versus an en suite - works surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that it’s a shame when Håfström suffers from third-act nerves, involving Enslin’s family in the action and pulling a trick that’s meant as a clever twist but is actually a sneaky cheat.

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In Theaters

• John Cusack as Mike Enslin; Samuel L. Jackson as Gerald Olin; Mary McCormack as Lily Enslin; Jasmine Jessica Anthony as Katie Enslin

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• Mikael Håfström

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Movie review.

After the tragic loss of his young daughter to a debilitating disease, author Mike Enslin’s world is shattered. He separates from his wife, Lily, and tries to bury his emotional torment under a mountain of work. A semi-successful writer of haunted-hotel and possessed-graveyard stories, Mike totes his toolbox of spectrometers and infrared cameras to reported sites of paranormal activity, records his findings and then cranks out books to feed his fans’ obsession with ghosts and demons.

Of course, he doesn’t really believe in any of it. In fact, since losing his daughter he has become a cynical, lifeless husk of a man who doesn’t believe in much of anything.

Then Mike gets wind of a mysterious room in a hotel called The Dolphin. Purportedly, more than 50 people have met their end in room 1408. So he sets off to New York to debunk another ghost story and spend one more dreary, sleepless night dictating notes into his handheld recorder.

But the hotel manager refuses to let the writer stay in the deadly room. He insists that it’s evil, that no one has ever spent more than an hour in the room and lived. To emphasize his point, he tells Mike that they give room 1408 a light cleaning only once a month; the manager personally escorts the staff in and out, never letting the door close behind them. Mike grins, taking this news as nothing more than a stunt to increase the mystery (and the hotel’s bookings), and threatens to sue his way into the room. The manager pleads his case all the more, finally saying, “I don’t want you to check into 1408 because I don’t want to clean up the mess.” But Mike refuses to back down.

Turning the key in the lock, the gloating scribbler strides into the hotel room and instantly loses his sense of triumph. He finds 1408 to be the bland nothing of a room that he expected all along. “This is it?” he asks.

This time, however, is it.

Bizarre happenings commence: The clock radio unexpectedly blares out an eerily telling Carpenter’s tune and starts ticking down from 60 minutes. The walls shift. Paintings swim. Bogeymen become real as Mike realizes—too late—that what he believes to be true isn’t necessarily the truth.

Particularly in room 1408 .

Positive Elements

After letting his personal pain drive a wedge between him and his wife (“Every time I looked at you I saw her face”), Mike’s experience in room 1408 strips away all his foolish pretences and helps him realize how much he needs and loves her. Lily does everything she can to help her estranged husband (in spite of his past choices). [ Spoiler Warning ] Ultimately, she is the instrument of his (temporal) salvation.

Spiritual Elements

Mike and Lily are trying to comfort their dying young daughter, Katie, when she asks, “Are there people where I’m going?” Mike tries to change the subject, but Katie assures her dad that it’s OK because “everyone dies.” Lily tells her daughter that her destination after death (it’s never explicitly called heaven ) will be a beautiful place. Katie asks, “Will God be there?” Mike answers in the affirmative. Katie looks searchingly at her dad and asks him, “Do you really believe that?”

Mike says his beloved daughter’s illness is confirmation that there is no God. “What kind of God would do this to a little girl?” He later speaks of his skepticism about “ghoulies, ghosties and long-legged beasties,” and says, “There’s no God to protect us from them, is there?” In room 1408, he finds a Bible and tosses it aside. With time, as the horrors mount, the writer looks to the Word for comfort and discovers that all its pages are now blank. After a series of torments, Mike talks to a “hotel operator” from the phone in 1408 and asks why they don’t just kill him and get it over with. The operator’s answer to that question implies that the haunted room is trying to induce Mike to commit suicide: “Because all guests of this hotel enjoy the benefit of free will.”

[ Spoiler Warning ] Through several painful scenes, Mike’s dead daughter calls for his help and cries about being afraid, longing to be with him again. She questions if her father loves her any longer. When Mike thinks he’s free from his prison, he repeats, “Thank God” a number of times.

Sexual Content

Lily wears a low-cut top. Mike flips on the TV and sees the pay-per-view order screen for a series of porn films. Several people are in bathing suits on a beach (including bikini-clad girls and bare-chested guys).

Violent Content

The hotel manager gives Mike a file of pictures of people who have committed suicide or died “naturally” in room 1408. We catch quick glimpses of photographs of several blood-splattered dead bodies, along with a close-up of what appears to be someone’s throat wound and a woman drowned in the bathtub. As Mike searches the room for blood stains, the pictured images come flashing back to his mind’s eye.

Several ghostly specters of previous suicide victims in the room jump out of its window. Mike’s hand is smashed in the same window and then scalded by steam. He wraps the bleeding mitt in a cloth, but blood soaks through, streaking walls and furniture. Mike sees a vision of his daughter walking over broken plaster with bleeding feet. Later, he hugs her close to himself, and she dies in his arms and crumbles to ash. Mike is attacked by several ghoulish creatures (he kicks one, and its skull-like head crumbles). He also falls from an elevated ventilation shaft onto a table and clings precariously to a window ledge.

Water floods the room from a painting, and Mike almost drowns. The same room gets set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word knocks once, while the s-word pounds 10 times. Other profanities include four or five uses each of “a–,” “h—” and “d–n.” “B–ch” and “b–tard” also show up. Jesus and God are both blasphemed, with God’s name being mixed four times with the word “d–n.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Mike drinks hard alcohol and beer on a number of occasions. For instance, one night in a hotel room, he dictates notes and plows his way through a basket of minibar-sized bottles of booze. In room 1408, Mike takes many ample swigs directly from a large bottle of alcohol. Hotel patrons consume wine in the lobby. The hotel manager imbibes a glass of scotch. Mike and his wife indulge in wine and tequila over dinner.

Although Mike professes to have quit smoking, he always carries a cigarette over his left ear in case of an emergency. At a particularly disastrous moment near the end of the film, he lights and smokes it. He also sees himself smoking a cigarette earlier.

Other Negative Elements

A painting shows a woman baring her breast to feed what appears to be a dead child on her lap.

1408 is an old-school scare tale adapted from a short story by Stephen King and made palpably immersive by the deft crafting of director Mikael Håfström and the perfectly pitched acting of John Cusack. Sidestepping the hack-and-slash gore that splatters most of today’s horror, the movie takes an off-center Twilight Zone approach to the genre and sucks its audience down a swirling psychological drain.

Mike Enslin is physically battered and emotionally pummeled as he thrashes around a physics-defying hotel room that seems to be crumbling from paranormal dry rot. But is he being tricked? Has he been drugged? He grabs his recorder and whispers intensely to himself, “We don’t rattle.” We in the audience, though, are never quite sure if all this bedevilment is being perpetrated by a sly hotel manager, true supernatural horrors or by Enslin’s own collapsing sanity.

Alongside this single-occupancy dementia, the film raises some significant questions: What really happens after we die? How can terrible things happen to the innocent? How do we deal with the harshest tragedies that life tosses at us? What foundation, what anchor, do we have?

Unfortunately, while it sets us to pondering, the film also plunges us into a typical Stephen King world where evil is omnipotent and goodness, if it wins at all, succeeds not on its own strength and virtue, but by happenstance.

Hints are tossed out that love will overcome and that believing in something larger than oneself might be important. But these are only the merest wisps, and they’re swallowed whole by 90 white-knuckled minutes of … ghoulies, ghosties and long-legged beasties.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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(105 mins, 15) Directed by Mikael Hafstrom; starring John Cusack , Samuel L Jackson, Mary McCormack

Stephen King has obviously got a thing about hotels (frightening places) and writers (troubled people) and as in The Shining, they're conjoined in 1408, Swedish film-maker Mikael Hafstrom's stylish horror movie based on a King story. The protagonist, Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a one-time serious writer, turned cynical and opportunistic after the death of his young daughter from leukaemia, who spends his time writing debunking pieces on haunted houses and hotels.

The film amusingly builds up to him coming to stay in the dread room 1408 of the 96-year-old Dolphin Hotel on New York's Lexington Avenue. Despite the entreaties of the suave manager (Samuel L Jackson), arrogant Mike books in for the night and truly scary things happen. Has he been set up? Is he mad? Is it all a dream? Though not especially original, this is frightening and disturbing film and the effects take a while to wear off.

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'1408' is still the little Stephen King movie that could, 15 years later

1408 takes a short story and turns it into big cinematic scares.

The history of Stephen King film adaptations is famously uneven , a mixture of masterpieces and duds, and that's particularly true when you look at adaptations of his short fiction. What started with segments in anthology films like  Creepshow  soon gave way to feature-length adaptations of King's short stories like  Children of the Corn ,  Maximum Overdrive ,  Graveyard Shift , and a host of others. In some cases, the concept at the heart of the story was enough to expand nicely into a 90-minute scarefest, while in others the translation plainly didn't go very well. 

Thankfully,  1408  is a welcome case of the former, a film adaptation that keeps the core of King's original piece of short fiction intact, then expands it into an intimate, tightly structured descent into madness. Released 15 years ago this month,  1408  is the little Stephen King movie that could, a sometimes forgotten but still quite solid piece of horror cinema that holds up because of its tight, laser focus on its chosen subject. 

Originally released in the audio collection  Blood and Smoke  and later printed in King's 2002 collection  Everything's Eventual , "1408" is King's riff on a classic ghost story format: The Haunted Room at the Inn. It follows Mike Enslin (played by John Cusack in the film) a writer best known for a series of travel books on haunted houses, haunted cemeteries, and haunted castles. Mike has chosen haunted hotels as the subject of his next release, and in his research, he stumbles upon a hotel room so notorious that the hotel in question won't even open it to guests anymore. With a reputation like that, the room has to be in Mike's next book, and he demands that the hotel's manager (Samuel L. Jackson) let him stay the night in room 1408, a room with a long history of suicides and deaths with an aura so frightening that even the maids can only stay in the room for minutes at a time. 

The film adaptation, directed by Mikael Håfström from a script by Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski, keeps this setup intact, and carries over many important details from Mike's life and the overall setup of the story. In King's tale, Mike is a failed poet and once-promising fiction writer who turned to "true" ghost stories to make money and turned out to be good at it, despite his cynicism over all things supernatural. He's still holding a grudge over his fiction not working out, but he's good at what he does, and he's especially good at making sure everyone knows that he's not the least bit inclined to believe in ghosts. The problem with this, as both the book and the film version of the hotel manager point out, is that Mike's worldview goes beyond skepticism and into flat-out negativity, as his writing and his outlook seem to rob anyone and everyone of the possibility that there might be something more beyond death. He is, as the manager puts it, a crusher of dreams, out to squash the idea that anyone could ever endure beyond this mortal coil. 

It's with this basic tonal setup (though the actual confrontation with these words comes slightly later in the film) in place that  1408  leads Mike into the title room for what's roughly an hour of screentime in the film, time that ticks down on the room's malfunctioning bedside alarm clock as the writer slowly spirals into darkness. Before he enters the room, Mike gets a very basic summation of what 1408 is from the manager: "It's an evil f***ing room," not a direct quote from King's story, but a concise way of laying out what King set out to depict. That's the trick to  1408  on both the page and the screen. It's not a ghost story in the traditional sense. It's about something much darker. 

In the story, what happens to Mike in the room is a little more nebulous and open to interpretation, but the film requires at least a slight expansion on what goes on within those walls, and how Mike deals with it. Håfström stages the action like a survival thriller, first introducing the supernatural elements, then following Mike's methodical mind as he attempts to first explain away, then actively escape events in the room. It's an impressively structured look at how someone might really go about trying to escape a hotel room, from trying to pick the lock on the door all the way to crawling out the window and onto the ledge, and watching as the room adapts to Mike's efforts makes the tension both palpable and sustained. 

Then there's the thematic heartbeat of the film, the ideas the screenwriters expand on from King's original story to give it a little more heft for the screen. In the story, Mike is amicably divorced. In the film, he's separated from his wife (Mary McCormack) after the loss of their daughter, who died very young from an illness. This loss, and the drifting, lonely life Mike has developed in its aftermath, hangs over the film, and becomes the key piece of his existence that the evil room exploits for maximum horror effectiveness. How Mike deals with that exploitation, and how it eventually resolves, makes up the true heart of the film, and helps  1408  build from clever setpiece to all-out exploration of existential dread. 

A decade and a half after its release,  1408  still ranks among the best Stephen King adaptations, even if it's been pushed aside by higher-profile projects in the public imagination. If you never made time for it, or if you haven't seen it since theaters, give it a try. It'll make you think twice about your next hotel stay, at the very least. 

1408  is currently streaming for free on Tubi .

Looking for a newer Stephen King adaptation? Check out  Firestarter , streaming on Peacock. 

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John Cusack checks into Room 1408 at Manhattan’s posh Dolphin Hotel and finds that the joint is jumpin’ with ghosts who will do their damnedest to make sure the dude will not get out alive.

It’s a hellish premise, just the wicked mastery you expect from Stephen King, whose short story gives this mindbender its spine. King’s recent work has been royally botched onscreen (hello, Secret Window , Needful Things and Dreamcatcher ). Not this time. For that all praise to Cusack, who brings his welcome smartass savvy to the role of Mike Enslin, the author of bestsellers that debunk the idea of things that go bump in the night. Mike has his own demons, notably the death of his daughter (Jasmine Jessica Anthony), a tragic event that shattered his marriage to Lily (Mary McCormack).

It makes Mike’s cynicism palpable as he checks into Room 1408 despite the objections of hotel manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), who informs him that more than fifty people have died trying to spend the night there. Just to hear Jackson intone the line — “it’s an evil fucking room” — is enough to shiver your timbers.

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Swedish director Mikael Hafsrom, who scored with Evil in 2003 and fizzled badly with Derailed two years later, seems to have regained his footing. The mid-section of 1408 is saddled with tacky and needless special effects, but Hafstrom ratchets up the tension big time as Cusack pulls out all the stops in a performance way beyond frightfest duty.

The fact that 1408 is relatively free of gore has encouraged some critics to use it to attack what they call the torture porn of such directors as Hostel ‘s Eli Roth. But Roth is a gifted filmmaker with his own goals and methods to achieve them. Hafstrom wisely takes the path King intended: to plumb the violence of the mind. Heebie-jeebies are guaranteed.

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The Ending Of 1408 Explained

In 1999, prolific horror writer Stephen King released a short story called "1408." Focusing on a cynical non-fiction writer named Mike Enslin, the story follows Mike as he travels to the Dolphin Hotel in NYC to research his next book, "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Hotel Rooms," by staying in the infamous room 1408. While the hotel manager, Mr. Olin, warns Mike of the room's horrific history, this doesn't dissuade him, and Mike experiences a night of darkness and haunting experiences that change him forever.

The short story was adapted into a film version in 2007 directed by Mikael Håfström, starring John Cusack as Mike and Samuel L. Jackson as Olin. The film follows the same simple premise, with Mike being urged to visit the Dolphin Hotel's room 1408. "1408" adds a sad backstory to Mike and ramps up the horror, but it's a relatively accurate adaptation of the source material, at least up until the various endings. As a classic, stuck-in-a-room horror story, what's not to like?

When "1408" was released, critics were generally positive, with the older horror film earning a Certified Fresh 79% on Rotten Tomatoes with 175 reviews. According to the Critics Consensus, "relying on psychological tension rather than overt violence and gore, 1408 is a genuinely creepy thriller with a strong lead performance by John Cusack." The movie also did quite well at the box office, earning around $133 million worldwide, with a budget of only $25 million ( Box Office Mojo ).

Despite how successful "1408" was, the movie can still be very confusing, especially if you don't know the history of the alternate endings. To help you out, here's the ending of "1408" — explained.

Room 1408 is definitely real

One thing that the King adaptation makes completely clear is that room 1408 and everything that goes on inside is not a part of Mike's imagination. It's real. When Mike originally goes to the Dolphin Hotel, he sees room 1408 as a challenge to prove that it's all fake. Documenting his experience on a cassette recorder, Mike begins to see and hear strange things soon after entering the room. He tries to leave the room but is unable to do so, and 1408 takes advantage of his past trauma with his father, wife, and daughter in order to torture him. At one point, 1408 even tricks Mike into thinking he's escaped and moved on with his life, but it's all another way to play with his mind.

So why is all this happening? Well, there's no real reason, aside from Mike's decision to enter the room. It appears to be an invitation to 1408 to test his limits, just as it has with all the other people who've stayed there. Many of the haunting events in 1408 have to do with past visitors — or victims — of the room, but it eventually gets personal, mixing the real world horror of trauma and grief with supernatural hauntings. Of course, with any horror film, it could be chalked up to the protagonist's imagination or some hallucination, but like with all of King's works, the story of "1408" is based in a world where dark and supernatural places do exist, and this hotel room is just one of them. In the theatrically released ending to "1408," Mike's wife Lily (Mary McCormack) validates his experiences when she finds the cassette tape and plays it, hearing the voice of their daughter, Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony), who at that time is already long dead.

The different endings of 1408

"1408" is a surprising film in that it actually has a few different endings. The ending that was originally shot for the film has Mike dying in a fire that destroys room 1408. At Mike's funeral, Olin arrives to see Lily and attempts to give her all of Mike's personal items, including his cassette player. She declines, and he returns to his car. Opening the box of Mike's stuff, Olin listens to the cassette tape and hears Katie's voice, before being horrified at seeing a burnt Mike in his backseat through the rearview mirror. This ending, which is dubbed the director's cut, ends with a look inside of what remains of room 1408, where a ghostly Mike smokes a cigarette and walks off to reunite with his daughter. Audiences apparently thought this ending was too dark, and so the official theatrical release ended with Mike's survival, his reunion with Lily, and the listening of the tape.

But it got even more confusing over the years, as the director's cut was reportedly made the default ending in later releases on streaming networks and cable broadcasts of the film. For people watching "1408" who might be interested in seeing both endings, it's now very difficult to find the ending in which Mike survives, at least in U.S. versions of the movie. Surprisingly, this actually happens to be the preferred ending for a lot of people, with many seeing the ending in which Mike and Lily hear their daughter's voice on the tape as more poignant and unsettling. The wikipedia page  fo "1408" reports that there was also a third ending, a slightly different reworking of the original ending with the funeral, but there are no sources listed for this information.

The movie vs. the short story

As with any adaptation, there are bound to be some changes to the story. With "1408," the source material is a short story, so the film has to expand and fill out Mike's experience in the room at the Dolphin to last a whole movie's length. Probably the biggest change between the story and the film is the addition of Mike's backstory. Mike has a wife, Lily, who he is estranged from after their daughter Katie dies. It's an event that no parent ever wants to experience, and the grief tears apart many couples. 

In the aftermath, Mike turns to his writing and a fascination with the supernatural to deal, pursuing any and all reports of ghostly sightings or experiences, yet finding them all to be hoaxes. Then he gets a postcard of the Dolphin Hotel in the mail with the warning, "Don't enter 1408." Mike obviously doesn't listen and heads there right away, and this is where the film version of "1408" catches up with the beginning of the short story.

Along with that, the various endings of the film definitely diverge from the short story. In the original tale, Mike survives 1408 by setting his shirt on fire and breaking the room's hold on him for long enough to escape. Luckily for Mike, another visitor to the hotel is right outside in the hallway with a bucket of ice in hand. Hearing Mike's screams, he runs to him and douses the fire. After everything that happens, Mike stops writing and lives a miserable, fearful life, scared of the dark and the outside world. 

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1408: the creepy true story that inspired the movie.

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1408 Is Stephen King’s Most Underrated Short Story Adaptation

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• "1408" is a horror movie adaptation of Stephen King's short story of the same name, and is considered one of the best in the genre.
• The story was inspired by real incidents at San Diego's Hotel del Coronado, where a young woman named Kate Morgan took her own life.
• Parapsychologist Christopher Chacon's investigation at the hotel revealed several paranormal incidents, although not as terrifying as depicted in the movie.

As surreal as 1408 's storyline may seem, it is actually based on a true story. Directed by Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, 1408 was released in 2007 and is still hailed as one of the best horror movie adaptations of Stephen King's books . It featured John Cusack as Mike Enslin, a paranormal skeptic who pens books that debunk supernatural occurrences. His latest investigation takes him to a grand New York City hotel named The Dolphin that accommodates an infamous haunted room, the titular 1408. Despite warnings from hotel manager Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), Mike insists on staying in 1408 and soon finds his skepticism tested in terrifying ways.

The Stephen King movie is based on the short story of the same name penned by the master of the macabre, Stephen King. The story first appeared in his self-narrated audiobook Blood And Smoke, and later in his short story collection Everything’s Eventual . In the movie, Mike records his thoughts on room 1408, stating, “ Hotel rooms are a naturally creepy place, don’t you think? I mean, how many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many of them lost their minds ?” That line is ripped almost verbatim from the foreword King wrote for 1408 in Everything’s Eventual , but the inherently creepy nature of hotel rooms was not the only inspiration for the story.

The John Cusack vehicle 1408 is the story of a man versus a room, making it more impressive that it's one of Stephen King's best adaptations.

The Hotel Del Coronado Inspired Stephen King's 1408

According to reports (via Hotel del Coronado’s website ), Stephen King was inspired to write the short story, 1408 , after reading about an investigation conducted by parapsychologist Christopher Chacon at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado. Built in the late 1880s, the luxurious hotel was a playground for Hollywood’s elite in the Roaring Twenties and hosted stars including Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, and Greta Garbo. However, it is most famous for a tragic incident that took place in its vicinity a few years after its grand opening.

In 1892 a young woman named Kate Morgan checked into the Hotel del Coronado on Thanksgiving under a false name and informed the staff she was waiting for a male companion. Five days after checking in, however, Kate’s body was found on a flight of stairs leading to the beach after she took her own life. Since then, hotel guests and employees have reported several spooky incidents mostly centered around the third-floor guestroom Morgan occupied. From inexplicably moving objects to disembodied voices and footsteps, the hotel's staff has reported it all.

Are Any Of The Events In 1408 Real?

Strangely, Christopher Chacon experienced paranormal incidents in a room that was a part of the maids’ quarters in Hotel del Coronado; not in Kate Morgan's original room. After setting up infrared cameras, magnetic meters, and other relevant investigation devices, Chacon and his team detected a total of 37 abnormalities in the former maid’s room, including a glass that fell to the floor by itself. Chacon’s experiences were not even remotely as terrifying and bizarre as Mike Enslin's in 1408 . However, they still established that Stephen King's short story and the 1408 movie adaptation have some semblance of reality to them.

Sources: Hotel del Coronado’s website

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This year’s lineup includes major Hollywood premieres like Furiosa : A Mad Max Saga starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth, Kevin Costner’s first film of a planned four-part series Horizon: An American Saga , Francis Coppola’s long-gestating Megalopolis , Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness in a reteam with Emma Stone, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada and Andrea Arnold’s Bird to name a few.

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Read all of Deadline’s takes below throughout the festival, which runs May 14-25. Click on the title to read the full review and keep checking back as we update the list.

Section: Un Certain Regard Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Endre Hellesveit, Øystein Røger, Vera Veljovic Deadline’s takeaway: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel’s lineage should give you a fair idea of what’s in store here, but, surprisingly,  Armand  doesn’t dig especially deep into the human psyche, finally falling into a strange no man’s land between intense character drama and jet-black comedy.

Director: Andrea Arnold Section: Competition Cast: Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Jason Buda, Jasmin Jobson, James Nelson Noyce, Frankie Box, Franz Rogowski, Deadline’s takeaway: Andrea Arnold knows just how to get under our skin. She embellishes the film with fantastical elements, but whether they’re really happening or part of Bailey’s childlike desperation to believe in anything magical, the film doesn’t make clear. But Arnold certainly wants us to know one thing: Bailey will be OK.

Caught By the Tides

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point

Director: Tyler Taormina Section: Directors’ Fortnight Cast: Matilda Fleming, Michael Cera, Chris Lazzaro, Elsie Fisher, Gregg Turkington Deadline’s takeaway: It’s hard to categorize Taormina’s film, and, for some, its freewheeling, indie  American Graffiti  vibe might take a little getting used to. But  Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point  is a trip for anyone willing to roll with it, and more than cements Taormina as a talent to watch.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes

Director: Nanette Burstein Section: Cannes Classics With: Elizabeth Taylor Deadline’s takeaway: The tapes recorded in 1964 weren’t actually  lost,  but it all makes for a satisfying journey through one of Hollywood’s most memorable careers. There is the feeling of intimacy that makes this one special, if not exactly full of new revelations.

Emilia Pérez

Director: Jacques Audiard Section: Competition Cast:  Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir, Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez Deadline’s takeaway: None of this ever seems ridiculous, because Audiard leans into the musical genre’s conventions; rather than bending his provocative story to fit it, he bends the form itself. It may be too soon to call the Palme d’Or with a week of the Cannes Film Festival left to run, but Emilia Pérez looks very much like a winner.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Director: George Miller Section: Out of Competition Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, Lachy Hulme, Matuse, Goran Kleut, Charlee Fraser Deadline’s takeaway: With Furiosa , George Miller, now seemingly ageless at 79 (he was 34 when the first Mad Max came out), has perhaps given birth to the greatest  Max  yet, a wheels-up, rock-and-rolling epic that delivers on the origin story.

Director: Laurent Bouzereau Section: Cannes Classics With: Faye Dunaway Deadline’s takeaway: You will find yourself with renewed respect for this great star after watching this documentary on her life. Time for a Faye Dunaway retrospective, and this fine film is perfect reason to do it.

Ghost Trail

Director: Jonathan Millet Section: Critics’ Week Cast: Adam Bessa, Tawfeek Barhom, Julia Franz Richter, Shafiqa El Till Deadline’s takeaway: On the surface, Ghost Trail uses the traditional tropes of the spy movie, but it isn’t exactly thrilling, certainly not in the manner of a John le Carré novel. Closer in spirit to Spielberg’s  Munich , it’s a quietly profound character study about the need for a closure that may never come.

The Girl with the Needle

Director: Magnus von Horn Section: Competition Cast: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm Deadline’s takeaway: It is because this story’s truths are so stark that this high-wire work succeeds. Magnus von Horn is a masterful talent, and there is plenty of prize potential within his film. It’s an unequivocal and beguiling triumph. 

Jim Henson Idea Man

Director: Ron Howard Section: Classics Deadline’s takeaway: Howard’s documentary brings fresh energy to the subject through the skillful use of animations based on Henson’s impressive drawings and wonderful archival rarities that go beyond what has been seen in previous treatments of Henson’s life.

Kinds of Kindness

Megalopolis.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola Section: Competition Cast: Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Shia LaBeouf Deadline’s takeaway: Watching Anthony Mann’s  The Fall of the Roman Empire  and eating cheese afterwards would be the only way to replicate Megalopolis ‘ fever-dream grandeur, a series of stunning images, carried along by the loosest of plots, that pontificate on the self-destructive nature of humankind, the only species capable of civilizing itself to death.

Director: Paul Schrader Section: Competition Cast:  Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli, Zach Shaffer, Kristine Froseth, Jake Weary Deadline takeaway: Oh, Canada is made up of pieces of a life put under a cinematic microscope at different periods, all moving in and out of the mind of a man who is dying but still lucid enough to tell the truths of his life as time is running out, some revealed for the first time as he grapples with both morality and mortality.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Director: Rungano Nyoni Section: Un Certain Regard Cast: Susan Chardy, Henry B.J. Phiri, Elizabeth Chisela Deadline’s takeaway: In Nyoni’s sophomore film, the focus is the rub between tradition and modernity, using the occasion of a family funeral as the jumping-off point for a slow-burn drama that builds, rather stealthily, to an unexpectedly emotional climax.

Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot

Director: Rithy Panh Section:  Premiere Cast: Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, Cyril Gueï Deadline’s takeaway: The journalists in Rithy Panh’s film aren’t superheroes; their quest for that truth has its own motivations. Yet the importance of their journey to find it cannot be understated. The film might not walk totally fresh ground for Panh, but there is real power in one filmmaker’s dedication to re-examining real world horror from many angles over many years.

The Second Act

Director: Quentin Dupieux Section:  Out of Competition Cast: Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon, Raphaël Quenard Deadline’s takeaway: Maybe Quentin Dupieux should have paid more attention when he was writing; maybe he should have spent longer in the editing suite. But if the results are always a bit ragged, does it matter? Dupieux might never make a masterpiece, but his slapdash, wild entertainments are irresistible.

Director: Lorcan Finnegan Section:  Midnight Screenings Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian Mcmahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Rahel Romahn, Finn Little, Charlotte Maggi Deadline’s takeaway: Nic Cage as a surfer dude? Unlikely, but who cares? The Surfer  is an object lesson in how to make a film economically by using a single location, a bunch of surfing extras and some stock footage of lizards. Which is the grindhouse ethic at work, for sure.

Three Kilometers to the End of the World

When the Light Breaks

Director: Rúnar Rúnarsson Section: Un Certain Regard Cast: Elín Hall, Katla Njálsdóttir, Ágúst Wigum, Mikael Kaaber, Baldur Einarsson, Gunna Hrafn Kristjánsson Deadline’s takeaway: As an opening-night choice for Cannes‘ Un Certain Regard,  When the Light Breaks  sets a standard for the original and specific vision that is expected of films in this section. 

Wild Diamond

Director: Agathe Riedinger Section: Competition Cast:  Malou Khebizi, Andréa Bescond, Idir Azougli, Ashley Romano Deadline’s takeaway: Riedinger’s debut feature approaches her subject with remarkable empathy, taking Liane on her own terms and seeing her surroundings largely through her eyes. 

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The 8 Show’ On Netflix, A Dark Comedy Where People Join A Strange Game Show Where Time Is Literally Money

Where to stream:.

• Korean Dramas

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Uncle Samsik’ On Hulu, Where A Corrupt Fixer And An Idealistic Young Politician Team Up In Postwar South Korea

Stream it or skip it: ‘blood free’ on hulu, a korean drama with miracle meat, corporate intrigue, and dangerous secrets, stream it or skip it: ‘parasyte: the grey’ on netflix, about a woman sharing her brain with an alien parasite, stream it or skip it: ‘a killer paradox’ on netflix, where a regular guy becomes an accidental serial killer and is pursued by a tenacious cop.

Scripted shows that throw a bunch of characters together in a strange game seem to be a specialty of South Korea. Squid Game came out three years ago and became a worldwide smash because it was a scripted drama that was about surviving a game. Was there plot outside the game play? Yes, but not much. Now, a more darkly comedic scripted series about people in a game has come out of South Korea. In this game, time is literally money.

THE 8 SHOW : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “I thought I’d be different,” says Bae Jin-su (Ryu Jun-yeol) as he looks out on the water as he stands at the railing of a bridge.

The Gist: Jin-su there because he’s about to end it all. He’s heavily in debt, owing 900 million won (about $667,000) to loan sharks. He works a lot of minimum-wage jobs, like at a convenience store, and has no discernable skills, thanks to his liberal arts college degree. He borrowed the money after an investment banker promised him he’d help him turn a huge profit, which of course didn’t work. So, after dangling from 40 stories up while washing windows, Jin-su felt he had no other choice.

Right before he jumps, he sees notices that money is going into his account, and a limo pulls up. Jin-Su thinks it’s some sort of citywide suicide-prevention program, and is surprised when the drinks in the limo are fake. He’s dropped off at a theater and presented with a card, a stack of money, and numbered cardkeys. He can take the stacks of money and go home or he can take a cardkey and go through the curtain. At first he takes the money, thinking nothing but bad things are behind that curtain. But, he figures, he was about to kill himself, so if someone is harvesting organs back there, what’s the difference?

Behind the curtain is a massive, colorful room, and eight floors of bedrooms. A clock reads 24:00:00.00. The number on his cardkey – 3 – corresponds to the floor he’s on. He goes into the room, and sees an empty space and a digital scoreboard. He’s presented with a uniform with his key number on it and a rule book. What he eventually figures out is that every minute he spends in the room earns him 30,000 won. But he has nothing to sleep on or pee into, and the prices of anything he brings in are 100 times what they’d be in the real world. If he leaves the room before 8 AM, he loses half his earnings. So he improvises, getting a bottle to pee in and cardboard boxes and newspapers to sleep on.

The next morning, he sees that time has been added to the clock. He meets the other players in this game: 8F (Chun Woo-Hee), 7F (Park Jeong-Min), 4F (Lee Yul-Eum), 6F (Park Hae-Joon), 2F (Lee Joo-Young), 5F (Moon Jeong-Hee) and 1F (Bae Sung-Woo). They decide to refer to each other by their numbers. They all have distinctive personalities: 7F is logical, 6F a bit rough. 8F wears only her bra under her uniform jacket and acts privileged.

They not only figure out that everything in the common areas is fake, including the food, but if they call for supplies there, time is taken off the clock. But the time reduced costs less money than the money things cost in their rooms. So they all ask for buckets, toilet paper and cigs. Then, when they realize the “free” food isn’t coming, 8F admits she got 12 packs of food and water in her room. When the group figures out the food is for all of them, but it’s not supposed to leave her room, 7F figures out that the chute that delivers items to them connects all the rooms. All of the contestants go up to the 8th floor to 8F’s quarters. That’s when they realize that not everything in the game is created equal.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The 8 Show , written and directed by Han Jae-rim and based on the webtoons Money Game and Pie Game , feels a lot like Squid Game , except that no one is killed if they lose a challenge (we think).

Our Take: The 8 Show might be as dark as Squid Game , but it’s definitely more wryly funny than the Netflix megahit. In a way, it’s actually more intriguing. Sure, in both shows money is at stake. But in the case of The 8 Show , the contestants are going to have to figure out whether they will work together or be at each other’s throats in order to preserve whatever pot of money they think they’re winning.

We don’t know a ton about the characters playing this game. Except for 3F — Bae Jin-su — we don’t even know their names, at least not yet. But we don’t really need to right now. This is a case where each character’s broad archetypes serve the plot well. Someone needs to be the practical one. Someone needs to be the spoiled one, and someone needs to be the rebellious one. Jin-su’s thing is that he is good with prices and numbers, but for the most part he just seems like a neutral party. Because we’re seeing the game from his perspective, that’s a good archetype for him to settle into.

Han Jae-rim does try to get a bit stylistic, especially during the pre-credits sequence, which is shot in 4:3 format. We wonder if those kinds of stylistic touches will continue as the game gets more surreal; the set design of the game’s central courtyard is certainly colorful and surreal. We welcome some stylistic asides as the show goes on, because we suspect that some of the show’s dark humor is going to go by the wayside as the contestants figure out just how long the game is and how they may need to screw other players to get ahead. They’ve already figured out there’s a hierarchy when it comes to the rooms, the money earned per minute and the food. What other things are the game masters going to do to mess with these people?

Sex and Skin: Besides 8F parading around in her bra like she’s Sue Ellen Mischke , there’s nothing.

Parting Shot: The contestants see 8F’s room and realize she’s making much more per minute than they are. One of the contestants says, “Aw, shit” in English.

Sleeper Star: 7F, played by Park Jeong-Min, is certainly asserting himself as a leader in the first episode, given his application of logic to the proceedings. Who knows how long that will last, though?

Most Pilot-y Line: When the two thugs come to Jin-su’s flat to break his legs, they bang on his door, but are immediately shooed off by a mom whose baby is being woken up.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Like Squid Game , the fun of The 8 Show is seeing just what kind of situations the characters are going to be put in and how they figure out how to play the strange game they find themselves in.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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Francis Ford Coppola’s Megabudget New Movie Is a Journey Into the Heart of Madness

Megalopolis stars aubrey plaza as a character named wow platinum. it only gets weirder from there..

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis took 41 years to make. It might take as long to understand. Coppola’s magnum opus, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last night, is a movie of extraordinary highs and baffling lows, alternately dazzling and confounding. Sometimes, in the same moment, it’s both. When I asked colleagues who’d seen it—at a remote early-morning screening, added at the last minute to accommodate Coppola’s preference for IMAX—they looked at me like the mute humans in the Planet of the Apes movies, as if their powers of speech had abruptly and unexpectedly deserted them. No one wants to trash an elderly legend’s passion project, one that, after decades of trying and failing to get it made, he finally financed with some $120 million of his own money—not to mention one that is dedicated to his late wife, Eleanor, who died last month. But it’s also a film that defies and even actively resists description, one that sounds even loopier in summary than its 138 minutes feel. You have to see it to believe it. And even then, you may not.

Now for the loopy summary. Adam Driver stars as Cesar Catilina, a visionary architect who is equal parts Robert Moses and The Fountainhead ’s Howard Roark. After inventing a revolutionary new building material called Megalon, he plans to rebuild the city of New Rome—essentially a version of Manhattan frozen in the 1930s—according to a utopian template, and doesn’t seem particularly concerned about how many presently occupied buildings he has to demolish to make room for it. He’s opposed by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a stoic ruler with more modest and less destructive goals for civic improvement, as well as a collection of the city’s moneyed interests: megabanker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight), high-powered fixer Nush Berman (Dustin Hoffman), and his ambitious cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), a mulleted playboy with his own designs on power. Although he’s still mourning his dead wife, Cesar has been involved for some time with financial reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a sultry blonde willing to use every asset she has to become someone who makes news rather than covering it. Eventually, he falls in love with the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), approaching a return to happiness even as the world around him crumbles. Oh, and also: He can stop time with his mind.

That jumble of plot points and influences—names borrowed from ancient history and from the rough drafts of unwritten Thomas Pynchon novels—doesn’t begin to convey the chaotic experience of watching Megalopolis , which is one of the most genuinely unhinged things ever projected on a screen. I can’t say whether the fact that Coppola’s hero occupies the top floor of the Chrysler Building, whence he surveys the city like a scale model laid out for his re-envisioning, is an intentional reference to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster , a cycle of five films of varying lengths—along with accompanying sculptures, drawings, and other associated works—whose centerpiece is a battle with the creator of Manhattan’s Art Deco landmark. But it shares with Barney’s interdisciplinary sprawl a desire to ingest and refashion the entire history of an artistic medium, to reconsider, in Coppola’s case, just what movies are . He’s quite obviously inspired by the unchecked grandiosity of Hollywood’s silent era and especially the cast-of-thousands epics of Cecil B. DeMille; at times, the effort to simply take stock of all the name actors Coppola has coaxed into appearing for the space of a few shots overwhelms the ability to keep track of which characters they’re meant to be playing. One disgruntled crew member kvetched to the Guardian that Coppola spent the better part of a day tinkering with an on-set visual effect that could have been accomplished in “ 10 minutes ” via digital means, and that was after he fired virtually all of the film’s previous visual effects team. The movie industry’s trade papers have covered Megalopolis ’ production with a kind of prurient glee, tut-tutting Coppola’s departure from conventional Hollywood practices. The man made The Godfather , after all. What a shame.

In the 27 years following his last studio movie, an adaptation of John Grisham’s legal thriller The Rainmaker , Coppola abandoned traditional narrative with a vengeance. But though Youth Without Youth , Tetro , and Twixt had their virtues, they were also something of a chore to watch. Megalopolis is, by contrast, a hoot: mostly on purpose, occasionally by accident, and sometimes, as when Voight opens a particular fraught encounter by discussing the size of his boner, the latter turns into the former. At times, you can see how Coppola has adjusted his script to changing times; the third act begins with an analogue for 9/11, and LaBeouf’s character, a wealthy failson with a talent for using populist rhetoric to whip up political fervor is … well, you know. At other times, it seems as if he’s been ensconced in the Silverfish, the custom-built trailer where he has retreated to work out on-set problems since the days of One From the Heart , for decades instead of hours. (His attempt at envisioning a virginal pop starlet feels particularly out of touch.) It’s a movie in which there are big ideas and intricately worked-out details, but the two don’t always seem to be in communication with one another.

About those ideas: When he’s applying the arc of ancient Rome to contemporary America, Coppola might as well be an old man muttering at the History Channel. But visually and cinematically: Hold onto your socks. Among his more audacious (and easily summarized) gambits is a moment where Cesar calls a press conference and takes a question from a live person in the room, who, at least in my screening, stumbled up on stage with a flashlight and a microphone stand, did his part, and then vanished back into the dark. So long, fourth wall.

Among the many delights of imagining how Megalopolis will play in the real world and not in the auteur-friendly environs of Cannes is wondering just how Coppola and the film’s distributor, whoever it may end up being, plan to execute this idea at scale. Will there be a hundred people with microphone stands, waiting in the wings at weekday matinees? But to fret over the practicalities is perhaps to underestimate the foxiness behind Coppola’s apparent madness. As the recent flood of obituaries for Roger Corman remind us, Coppola was among the raft of future titans, including Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Jonathan Demme, who got their start making no-budget films for the B-movie king, and Coppola’s epic is as informed by the lowbrow imperatives of drive-in schlock as it is by highfalutin philosophies. (You can certainly see Corman’s influence in the movie’s regular deployment of gratuitous female nudity, while it keeps its male stars buttoned to the chin.) Where the narrative going into Cannes was dominated by stories about Coppola’s excesses and the movie’s borderline-unreleasable state, now it’s balanced out by tales of its inspired lunacy. Subtitled “A Fable,” Megalopolis can be read as a parable of what happens when you let artists take over the world, and while that may not run more smoothly, it’s a heck of a lot more interesting.

Quoting liberally from Marcus Aurelius and Shakespeare, including during an uncut recitation of “To be or not to be” by Adam Driver, Megalopolis is the product of man who has tried to put everything he knows or thinks into one climactic work. And whether or not it all fits (it doesn’t), it’s exhilarating to watch him try. For years, Coppola’s contemporary, George Lucas, who put $115 million of his own money into The Phantom Menace , seemed to have a lock on the most expensive self-financed movie ever made—a record Coppola has now outdone. Megalopolis might not outgross Star Wars: Episode 1 , but I know which movie I’d sooner watch twice.