My girlfriend's a Harry Potter fan and I'm not. In the wake of a recent impulse to make her happy, I suggested we see the new film. However, many of the reviews suggested that people who weren't familiar with the story (me) wouldn't get much out of it, and so she (probably following a similar impulse) suggested we see 1408 instead. She likes suspense, not horror, and I feel similarly.

I had hoped 1408 might be a reference to a year. It wasn't.

1408 is based on a Stephen King short story, and the basic premise involves an author (an author writing about authors? no way!) who stays in haunted houses for a living, writes about them in (apparently) scary ways, but never saw anything unusual and doesn't believe in ghosts.

Will Room 1408 in the Flamingo Hotel, NYC, change all that?

For once, I'm going to give a nearly spoiler-free review, but let me mention that the film deals with the philosophical issues of death and the afterlife, and the main character goes through a number of self-realizations. I read a number of reviews saying they found the ending improbable, but I found the ending a lot more sensible and likely that the 50 or so minutes which came before.

My girlfriend liked it.

Me, on the other hand: my idea of evil is very different than Stephen King's idea of evil. What scares him is not what scares me. And although I believe in the supernatural, from my research and experience, I've concluded it doesn't generally work the way Stephen King envisions it.

1408 definitely starts well: the writing is good, the acting is good, the pacing is good, the film keeps your attention, and there's a lot of suspense which is built rather well. But, for me, at a certain point the film shifted from tense to a little silly. But I want to be clear: this film is not stupid: there are a number of rather clever mechanisms, and there's a larger story arc which kept my interest. But much of the action has the feel of a funhouse, with too many disconnected 'scary' or 'startling' things going on with no apparent unifying theme.

But I also realize I'm not typical in this regard, so I would guess that most people who like this kind of thing would enjoy this particular example.