Weekend Watch: 'The Shining' in IMAX, a Descent into Winter Madness

For Weekend Watch, you’ll find two recommendations: one timely pick tied to what’s new or returning, and one personal pick that isn’t as tied to the calendar but worth revisiting. The Shining isn’t exactly a cozy holiday watch, but it’s a winter film through and through, shaped by snow, isolation, and the long stretch of the season. Together, these picks offer something current to watch and something enduring to sit with.

There are movies you revisit because they’re comforting. The Shining isn’t one of them.

Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic is being rereleased in IMAX for the first time, and if that sounds excessive, it’s worth remembering how much this film is about physical space. The Overlook Hotel isn’t just a setting—it’s an environment that shapes everything inside it. Hallways stretch. Rooms repeat. The longer you stay, the harder it becomes to orient yourself.

Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a struggling writer and recovering alcoholic, takes a winter caretaker job at the isolated hotel, bringing along his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their young son Danny (Danny Lloyd), who possesses a psychic gift known as “the shining.” When the snow cuts them off from the outside world, something inside the Overlook emerges. Or maybe it’s always been there, waiting for someone vulnerable enough to hear it.

Thinking about it now, what stands out isn’t just the supernatural menace but how closely the film tracks a familiar pattern of self-destruction. Jack doesn’t spiral all at once. He rationalizes. He isolates. He insists—again and again—that he has things under control. The hotel doesn’t introduce his worst impulses; it amplifies them, giving resentment, self-pity, and buried anger room to expand.

Kubrick’s patience is key. For long stretches, very little happens. Instead, the film leans on repetition: the same hallways, the same routines, conversations looping back on themselves. Unease creeps in slowly. By the time violence erupts, it doesn’t feel shocking so much as tragically inevitable.

Seen in IMAX, that slow pressure becomes physical. The camera seems to linger longer. The spaces feel barer, more exposed. Even the quiet starts to feel heavy, like something pressing in from the edges. The Overlook isn’t grand in a glamorous way; it’s grand in a way that dwarfs the people trapped inside it. Familiar images—the patterned carpet, the snow, the bar—take on a more menacing weight.

Wendy’s role lands differently, too. Duvall plays her not as naïve, but as someone constantly adjusting and accommodating, trying to keep the peace in a house tilting toward danger. The horror isn’t just that Jack loses himself; it’s that Wendy and Danny witness it happening in real-time and can’t stop it.

This isn’t a cozy revival or a nostalgia watch. It’s a chance to sit with The Shining as a film about domestic fear, self-deception, and the stories people tell themselves to avoid accountability. IMAX doesn’t make it louder or flashier. It makes it harder to escape.

This one’s a different kind of Weekend Watch if you’re in the mood for something unsettling, yet still disturbingly relevant. Some films don’t change as you age. You do—and they’re there to meet you.

The Shining (IMAX) is in theaters now.

If The Shining is about a family unraveling under isolation and compulsion, The Night House is what’s left behind after the damage is done.

Director David Bruckner’s restrained, deeply unsettling horror film stars Rebecca Hall as Beth, a woman grieving the sudden death of her husband while living alone in the lakeside house he built for her. At first, it unfolds like a study of mourning—long silences, sleepless nights, the strange ways grief warps perception. As Beth begins to uncover unsettling secrets about her marriage, the film drifts into something darker and more existential.

What makes The Night House such a strong companion to The Shining is its focus on self-destructive behavior and despair as something intimate and hidden, rather than loud or explosive. Where Jack Torrance’s breakdown happens in plain sight, Beth is left to deal with the aftermath, piecing together the man she loved and the man she never fully knew.

The horror here isn’t loud. It lives in the negative space—the sense that something terrible is carefully concealed within the architecture of a life. Like Kubrick, Bruckner uses space and sound with precision: empty rooms, half-seen shapes, silences that stretch just a beat too long.

Hall’s performance is the film’s anchor. She plays Beth as sharp, brittle, darkly funny, and barely holding herself together. Here, grief isn’t a puzzle to solve, but a weight you learn to carry, even when the truth complicates your love.

The film doesn’t offer comfort or catharsis. But paired with The Shining, it opens a conversation across decades about the ways people disappear inside themselves—the stories they tell to survive, and how horror often lives not in what we see, but in what we refuse to face.

The Night House ultimately becomes a quietly devastating watch, best experienced late, lights low, phone far away.

The Night House is available to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, and Google Play.