THE SHINING (1980) | Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King and the Perfect Adaptation (High)

We went Low on Dreamcatcher, but this is a very particular kind of Low. This is not a boring bad movie. This is a wildly overstuffed, deeply strange, completely unfiltered bad movie that somehow has talented actors, a major Stephen King source, Lawrence Kasdan directing, William Goldman on the screenplay, a reported $68 million budget, and an alien that crawls out of somebody’s ass before Jason Lee fights it with a toilet brush. That is the central fascination of Dreamcatcher (2003). It often feels less like a new Stephen King story and more like somebody fed all of Stephen King’s previous work into a machine and asked it to generate the ultimate Stephen King mixtape: childhood friends, Maine, psychic powers, bullies, aliens, body horror, military quarantine, Derry, snow, telepathy, trauma, and alien ass monsters. In this episode, we revisit Dreamcatcher, directed by Lawrence Kasdan and based on the novel by Stephen King, as one of the strangest studio horror failures of the early 2000s. The movie stars Thomas Jane as Henry, Damian Lewis as Jonesy, Jason Lee as Beaver, Timothy Olyphant as Pete, Donnie Wahlberg as Duddits, Morgan Freeman as Colonel Curtis, and Tom Sizemore as Owen Underhill. That is a real cast. There is real money on screen. There are real filmmakers involved. And somehow all of that talent produced a movie where the phrase “shit weasel” becomes central to the mythology. The setup is not bad. Four lifelong friends reunite for their annual hunting trip in the Maine woods. Since childhood, they have shared a mysterious psychic connection tied to Duddits, a boy they defended from bullies when they were young. This year, something is different. A sick, disoriented stranger stumbles into their cabin, the woods go under military quarantine, and soon the group is dealing with alien parasites, telepathic possession, and an entity called Mr. Gray taking over Jonesy’s body. The first High is that the first act almost tricks us into thinking this might be a good movie. We meet each of the guys separately and immediately understand that something unusual connects them. Henry is using some kind of psychic ability with a patient. Jonesy shows empathy toward a student who cheated because he can sense there is more going on. Pete uses his strange gift to help a woman find her keys and tries to turn it into a date. Beaver is writing “SSDD,” same shit, different day, which becomes one of the movie’s repeated psychic signals. There is a real sense that something cosmic is pulling these guys back together. The cabin material also works better than it should. The guys irritate each other in believable ways. They have history. They talk like middle-aged friends who have been repeating the same jokes and rhythms for decades. There is a version of Dreamcatcher that stays with these four guys reconnecting in a cabin while something supernatural slowly closes in, and I would absolutely watch that movie. The biggest High, though, is the memory warehouse. Once Mr. Gray takes over Jonesy’s body, Jonesy retreats inside his own mind, which the movie visualizes as a warehouse filled with files, drawers, rooms, and stored memories. That is a genuinely cool idea. Jonesy is not gone. He is trapped inside the architecture of his own brain, watching Mr. Gray pilot his body from the inside. The movie suddenly becomes a psychological possession story, and for a little while, it feels like it has found something original. And honestly, we have to give Dreamcatcher credit for having no shame. Timothy Olyphant almost gets bitten by an alien that crawled out of a woman while he is writing his friend’s name in the snow with his own piss. There is something admirable about a studio movie this expensive being this weird. The biggest Low is obvious: shit weasels. The moment the movie reveals a monster in the toilet, everything changes. The first bathroom sequence is staged like horror, with Beaver holding the toilet lid shut while waiting for J

We went High on The Babadook, because this is the kind of horror movie that gets scarier the more you sit with it. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) is not just about a monster in a top hat with long fingers and a creepy children’s book. It is about the thing you lock in the basement, the thing you refuse to name, and the thing that gets stronger the longer you deny it. That is the central argument of this episode: there is the thing coming for you, and then there is the thing coming from you. The Babadook works because it collapses those two horrors into one. If you want to watch it as a literal boogeyman movie, you can. But for us, it becomes much scarier as a psychological horror story about grief, parental rage, resentment, exhaustion, and the terrifying thoughts good people are not supposed to admit they have. In this episode, we revisit The Babadook, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, starring Essie Davis as Amelia and Noah Wiseman as Samuel. Released in 2014, this is a movie that critics embraced but audiences have always seemed split on. We understand why. This is not comfort horror. This is not a funhouse ride. This is a movie that asks you to sit inside a house with a mother and child who are both drowning in grief, fear, loneliness, and emotional neglect. The story follows Amelia, a widow still haunted by the death of her husband Oscar, who died in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. Six years later, Amelia is barely functioning. Samuel is intense, imaginative, loud, frightened, and obsessed with building weapons to fight monsters. Then a disturbing pop-up book called Mister Babadook appears on their shelf, and once they read it, the thing that has been buried in the house starts clawing its way out. One of our biggest conversations is whether the Babadook is real or whether it is inside Amelia. Our answer is basically yes. The movie is powerful because it refuses to make that separation clean. There may be a supernatural force in the house, but the monster also represents everything Amelia has spent six years refusing to feel: grief, anger, resentment toward her child, exhaustion, guilt, and the taboo thoughts that motherhood does not allow her to say out loud. We talk a lot about Jennifer Kent’s vision and how specific it feels. There is a lesser version of this story that could have been a straightforward domestic drama about an overwhelmed widow on the verge of hurting herself and her child. Instead, Kent gives that internal horror the shape of an old silent-film nightmare: the top hat, the cloak, the long fingers, the stop-motion movement, the German expressionist look. The Babadook feels like something ancient, like a monster that has always existed because the feelings it represents have always existed. The children’s book is one of the movie’s smartest choices. Amelia and Samuel do not buy it. It is not gifted to them. It is just there, sitting on the shelf like it was always in the house. That is the metaphor. The grief was already there. The rage was already there. The book just opens it. The biggest High of the movie is Essie Davis, who gives one of the great modern horror performances. In the first half, she is performing “good mother” with every ounce of strength she has left. She is gentle, patient, soft-spoken, and clearly decaying underneath the mask. We can see the effort it takes to keep the monster down. As the movie goes on, that mask starts cracking. Her line readings become sharper. Her face changes. Her body changes. There are moments where she feels like she is channeling Jack Nicholson in The Shining, especially once the Babadook is fully inside her. But the performance never becomes empty horror-movie madness. It stays rooted in the terrible truth of the character: Amelia loves Samuel, and she is also furious at what his birth is tied to. That contradiction is the movie. We also defend Noah Wiseman as Samuel, because the criticism tha

We went Low on Virtuosity, but this is one of those Lows where the movie is bad in ways that are still weirdly entertaining. Virtuosity (1995) is mid-’90s techno-thriller anxiety blasted through a Windows 95 screensaver: virtual reality, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, serial killer databases, cyber gobbledygook, regenerative glass skin, and Russell Crowe grinning like he has decided to personally drag the whole movie into cyber hell. That is the central appeal of the episode. Denzel Washington is trying to ground this thing in grief, trauma, guilt, and redemption, while Russell Crowe is playing a homicidal computer program like a theater kid version of Agent Smith. They do not feel like they are in the same movie, and somehow, that is the best thing about the movie. Virtuosity is not good, but it has the kind of cable-movie energy where, if it is on, we are probably not changing the channel. In this episode, we revisit Virtuosity, directed by Brett Leonard and released in 1995, as part of that strange mid-’90s wave of technology thrillers that seemed equally fascinated and terrified by where computers, virtual reality, and the internet were going. This came out the same year as The Net, Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days, and you can feel that cultural anxiety all over it. The movie is goofy, dated, and often incoherent, but there is something interesting about watching a 1995 movie panic about artificial intelligence escaping its own parameters. The setup is pure high-concept nonsense in the best and worst ways. Denzel Washington plays Parker Barnes, a former cop serving prison time after killing the man who murdered his wife and daughter. He gets pulled into a virtual reality police training program built around SID 6.7, played by Russell Crowe. SID is not just one killer. He is an artificial criminal made from hundreds of murderers, terrorists, psychopaths, and serial killers, including the man who destroyed Parker’s family. Then, through a beautiful pile of mid-’90s nanotech mumbo jumbo, SID gets a synthetic body and escapes into Los Angeles. The biggest High is Russell Crowe. He is enormous in this movie. He preens, dances, grins, poses, and devours every scene like he knows the only way to save Virtuosity is to make it more ridiculous. And honestly, he is right. SID should be over the top. He is artificial. He has no restraint. He is made out of other people’s violence and programmed to treat murder like play. When he says he could kill Parker but likes to play, that is the whole character. He is not trying to win. He is trying to keep the game going. The other High is Denzel Washington, for the exact opposite reason. Denzel does not wink at the material. He does not play Parker Barnes like a man trapped in a goofy sci-fi action movie. He plays him straight, as a guy whose life has been wrecked by real violence and who is now being used by a system that does not care whether he survives. That contrast is where the better version of Virtuosity lives: an artificial villain who only understands violence as entertainment colliding with a real man whose entire life has been shaped by grief. The problem is that the movie never fully builds itself around that collision. It keeps falling back into generic mid-’90s action beats instead of digging into the most interesting idea it has. SID entering the real world should be the movie’s turning point. When he comes out of that strange snake-egg birth pod and says “whoa, gravity,” we get a glimpse of a better movie. He was a digital god inside a simulation, and now he has to deal with weight, pain, temperature, balance, hunger, fear, and maybe even mortality. That could have been fascinating. Instead, the movie cannot decide what SID is once he becomes real. Is he bound by physical reality, forced to learn the rules of the human world? Or is he a cartoon cyber demon with supervillain powers? Virtuosity wants both, which means the rules get fuzzy fast. Th

We went High on Nine Days, but this is a very different kind of High for us. This is not a massive cultural touchstone, a blockbuster, or one of those movies everyone already agrees is a classic. Nine Days (2021) is a small, quiet, underseen film with an enormous idea: what if, before you were born, you had to interview for the chance to live? That premise could have turned into something overly abstract or painfully sentimental, but Edson Oda’s Nine Days does something much more powerful. It uses tube TVs, VHS tapes, one isolated house, and a vast salt flat to ask one of the biggest questions a movie can ask: what makes life worth living? And instead of answering with speeches about destiny or meaning, it answers through small human moments: a peach, a bike ride, a joke at dinner, a scream from the top of a mountain, someone seeing you clearly before you disappear. In this episode, we talk about Nine Days, written and directed by Edson Oda, as one of the best movies almost nobody talks about. The film stars Winston Duke as Will, Zazie Beetz as Emma, Benedict Wong as Kyo, Bill Skarsgård as Kane, Tony Hale as Alexander, Arianna Ortiz as Maria, and David Rysdahl as Mike. It is a high-concept drama with an indie-scale approach, and that combination is exactly why it works. The setup is simple and devastating. Will lives in an isolated house surrounded by salt flats, watching human lives unfold through old television screens. When one of those lives ends, several unborn souls arrive at his door and compete for the chance to be born. Over nine days, Will interviews them, tests them, studies them, and decides which one gets to enter the world. But the longer the process goes on, the more the movie shifts away from the question of who deserves life and toward the question of whether Will can remember why life mattered to him in the first place. We spend a lot of time talking about how original this premise feels, especially now. This is the kind of small, high-concept adult drama that used to have more room in the movie landscape. Today, it feels like films either get made for very little or get inflated into giant franchise products, with almost nothing in the middle. Nine Days feels like it belongs to that missing middle: thoughtful, emotional, strange, ambitious, and built for adults who want a movie to sit with them after it ends. One of the biggest Highs is the movie’s minimalism. It could have buried itself in explanations about heaven, purgatory, angels, souls, or the mechanics of the afterlife. Instead, it keeps the world grounded and almost mundane. Will and Kyo have a job. There are groceries. There are reports. There are tapes. There are TVs stacked in a little house. That normalcy makes the otherworldly elements feel more haunting, not less. The movie does not need glowing portals or enormous visual effects. Its mystery works because it stays intimate. We also talk about the POV footage on the televisions. The idea that Will watches lives from the inside, through each person’s direct experience, is beautiful and immersive. It makes life feel both ordinary and miraculous. The movie finds meaning in the images that pass by quietly in the background, which is really the whole point. Most of life is not the big defining event. Most of life is the stuff we barely notice while it is happening. The performances are another huge High. Winston Duke has to play Will as buttoned-up, clinical, wounded, and deeply compassionate all at once. He is detached because he has to be, but we can feel how much the work is destroying him. Every time he recreates a final wish for one of the souls who is not selected, the movie becomes almost unbearably tender. He is there to comfort them before they disappear, and then he breaks when they are gone. Zazie Beetz as Emma is the soul of the movie. Emma represents the thing Will has forgotten: curiosity, presence, openness, and awe. She shows up late because she is probably looking at the

We went High on The Prestige, and this is one of those Highs where the movie almost feels built for this podcast. Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) is not just a movie about magic. It is a movie constructed like a magic trick, and the more you watch it, the more you realize Nolan has been showing you the secret from the beginning. He tells you what the trick is, puts the evidence in front of your face, and then waits for you to notice. That is why this movie keeps getting better every time we return to it. The secret impresses no one. It is the trick you use it for. That line is the whole philosophy of the movie. The Prestige is about obsession, performance, sacrifice, ego, grief, rivalry, and the terrible things people will do to be the one left standing when the audience applauds. In this episode, we revisit The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Christian Bale as Alfred Borden, Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier, Michael Caine as Cutter, Rebecca Hall as Sarah, Scarlett Johansson as Olivia, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. This is one of Dom’s favorite Nolan movies, and honestly, the case is not hard to make. It has everything Nolan does best: fractured timelines, obsessed protagonists, nested mysteries, a final reveal that changes the whole movie, and an ending that does not stop asking questions after the credits roll. The first big idea we talk about is that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan’s love letter to filmmaking. The three parts of a magic trick, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige, are basically the three acts of a movie. You show the audience something ordinary. You transform it into something impossible. Then you bring it back in a way that makes them wonder how you did it. Nolan understands endings better than almost anyone, and this movie is almost entirely built around the power of a final act that makes you immediately want to start the movie over. We also talk about how the opening image of the top hats in the woods becomes a perfect bookend with the final image of Angier’s bodies in the tanks. The movie begins with duplicates, death, and a mystery we do not yet understand. Then it slowly teaches us how to read what we have already seen. That is the magic trick. The movie is not hiding the secret so much as daring us to look closely enough. The performances are a huge High. Christian Bale has one of the most difficult jobs in the film because, on first viewing, he has to play Borden as a man divided by his own nature. On rewatch, once you know the truth, you realize he is playing two different men sharing one life. That makes every scene with Sarah more painful. When she says, “You don’t mean it today,” the line works one way the first time and a completely different way once you understand the trick. She is not married to a complicated man. She is married to a lie that keeps changing shape. That is where the movie’s emotional cost really lands. Sarah is not part of the trick by choice. She is collateral damage. She knows something is wrong, even if she cannot name it. The tragedy is that the person she loves is only partly available to her, and sometimes not even the right person at all. The same goes for Julia, Angier’s wife, whose death becomes the wound that drives the rivalry. These women are where the men’s obsession lands, and the movie is very clear that the cost of greatness, ego, and secrecy is not only paid by the men chasing applause. Hugh Jackman is just as strong as Angier because his performance shifts so carefully. At first, Angier feels like the more sympathetic character. He loses his wife in a horrible accident, and his anger at Borden makes emotional sense. But as the movie goes on, he becomes the more frightening figure. He is the showman who cannot invent the trick, so he steals, sabotages, and eventually builds his entire life around beating Borden. Jackman also gets to play Root, the drunken double, and that performance lets the movie show its own form