Stephen King's short story "1408" was a rare treat - a genuinely chilling, uncanny piece from someone whose talent at writing such things has been steadily on the wane for years. When I found out they were turning the story into a movie, my first thought was "they're gonna throw in special effects and a dumb back-story."

And indeed, the movie sacrifices a lot of what made the story so unnerving, while introducing irrelevancies and condescending to the audience. While it has a lot of really fine moments, to adapt a story like this inherently involves compromise.

The performances are the movie's greatest strength. John Cusack ably keeps the audience's attention with his deft sarcasm - his quiet asides carry the movie - and slow slide into numbed terror. As he plays the skeptic Mike Enslin who writes once-successful books about haunted rooms, who has come across the ultimate prospect for such a book, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where his skepticism fades into the conviction that room 1408 might destroy him. Samuel L. Jackson also pulls off his role well - the hotel manager, a man so convinced that the room will kill Enslin that he wines and dines him the one moment, then viciously condescends to him the next.

Once Cusack is in room 1408, though, the show is his alone. We've been informed that no one ever survives more than an hour in the room, that in fact there have been 56 deaths natural and suicidal in the room, and the rest of the situation plays out more or less in real time, as the room does its best to destroy Enslin's sanity.

And here's where the problem comes in. Does director Mikael Hafstrom not believe that audiences are capable of accepting a force of pure evil, that it must hold some motivation for destroying Enslin beyond just the malevolent glee of it? The movie introduces the notion that Enslin's ordeal is somehow a punishment for a) disabusing ghost-believers of their faith in the supernatural, b) letting his daughter die. All this is exquisitely dumb, and leads to a series of tiresome cliches (that standby of American horror flicks of the last few years, an emaciated little girl bleating "Don't you love me, Daddy?") that diminish what could be a truly harrowing story.

If the movie falters in convincing an audience that this could happen to anyone, it often succeeds in doing the things that scare everyone. A few jump scares are not particularly unpredictable, yet remain effective. There's one scene, doubtless a tribute to King's old story "The Ledge," in which Enslin scales the exterior heights in an effort at escape, finding an unpleasant surprise. And some subtle shifts in lighting are the nearest to the original short story's creeping discomfort that the movie gets.

As an adaptation, this isn't very good. Some of the best moments of King's story ("the light that makes the dead get up and tango"; "my brother was eaten by wolves on the Connecticut Turnpike") are reduced to one-liners in the hotel's back-story or in Cusack's muttered monologue. Trying to squeeze these moments in is fine, but I can't help but think that the movie overlooks what made the original story so effective in the first place. Even the voice on the telephone appears perfunctorily, and perhaps too late in the story.

Ultimately, the movie's biggest failure is the refusal to let evil be evil. Introducing a more putatively subtle psychology to the whole thing, digging into Mike Enslin's background and his weaknesses, diminishes the sense that the room's active sadism is egalitarian. Perhaps inadvertently, elsewhere, the movie introduces a sense of 9/11 allegory that's never overstated, but is quite sufficient as a thematic underpinning. They really oughta have left it at that.

The most unsettling moments here are the simplest: an abrupt change in lighting, in the room's overall look, causes more fear than most of the effects-based pyrotechnics, and more than all of the foolishness involving a dead daughter. I mourn what this movie could have been, but as a horror movie relying on something more than gruesome grotesquerie, it's a decent effort.

Recommended: Yes