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Roger Ebert’s review of The Shining (1980)

Here’s Roger Ebert’s review of Kubrick’s “The Shining” from 1980.

Exactly:

But there is a deleted scene from “The Shining” (1980) that casts Wendy’s reliability in a curious light. Near the end of the film, on a frigid night, Jack chases Danny into the labyrinth on the hotel grounds. His son escapes, and Jack, already wounded by a baseball bat, staggers, falls and is seen the next day, dead, his face frozen into a ghastly grin. He is looking up at us from under lowered brows, in an angle Kubrick uses again and again in his work. Here is the deletion, reported by the critic Tim Dirks: “A two-minute explanatory epilogue was cut shortly after the film’s premiere. It was a hospital scene with Wendy talking to the hotel manager; she is told that searchers were unable to locate her husband’s body.”

If Jack did indeed freeze to death in the labyrinth, of course his body was found — and sooner rather than later, since Dick Hallorann alerted the forest rangers to serious trouble at the hotel. If Jack’s body was not found, what happened to it? Was it never there? Was it absorbed into the past, and does that explain Jack’s presence in that final photograph of a group of hotel partygoers in 1921? Did Jack’s violent pursuit of his wife and child exist entirely in Wendy’s imagination, or Danny’s, or theirs?

I was interestingly revisiting the story myself less than two weeks later. Trippy.

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