1408 is the 2007 psychological horror directed by Mikael Håfström, adapted from Stephen King's short story, starring John Cusack as Mike Enslin — a cynical author who debunks haunted locations for a living — alongside Samuel L. Jackson as Gerald Olin, the manager of the Dolphin Hotel, and Mary McCormack as Mike's estranged wife Lily. The premise is delicious in its simplicity: a professional sceptic checks into the one hotel room that genuinely deserves its reputation, despite being warned that nobody has lasted more than an hour inside it. What follows is one of the more effective single-location horror experiences of its decade.

Let me lead with the headline: John Cusack puts in an absolute shift here. This may genuinely be the best acting I've seen from him — 2007 sitting comfortably within what I'd call his "still cared" era — and the film lives or dies on his performance, because he is alone on screen for the vast majority of the runtime. He carries it completely. The descent from smug scepticism into genuine unravelling terror is paced beautifully, and there's one sequence — Mike screaming at an empty minibar fridge after a hallucinated conversation collapses — that goes to a level of unhinged commitment very few actors ever reach.

The film itself is weird, interesting, occasionally annoying, and at times extremely stupid — and somehow the balance still lands on the positive side. It has a genuinely unique vibe and it commits to it without apology.

The emotional core is what elevates it. The scenes between Mike and his deceased daughter Katie genuinely broke my heart — particularly the moment she dies in his arms for what I believe is the second time, before crumbling to dust. Whether the room was showing him something real or not is beside the point. It was real to him, and that emotion transferred through the screen completely. For a horror film, the grief work here is remarkably affecting.

Technically, the film impresses too. The camera work is outstanding in stretches, and learning that the production achieved most of the room's transformations practically — with CGI used only to enhance rather than replace — makes it considerably more impressive in retrospect. The room feels physical because, largely, it was.

Samuel L. Jackson is excellent in his limited screen time as Olin, and my one structural complaint is that we don't get more of him. There's something genuinely intriguing about that character — what he knows, how long he's carried it, what his relationship to the room actually is — and the film simply declines to explore it.

And then there's the ending, which I have to be honest about. Mike left Lily after Katie's death — simply walked out. He calls her mid-haunting, reconciles with her after escaping by burning the room down with a Molotov fashioned from Olin's gifted cognac, and the two of them get back together. Then the tape recorder — which was inside a burning room — survives intact, and just happens to have captured the voice of their dead daughter. Lily hears it, drops a box in shock, and Mike responds by silently staring at her. No comfort. No words. Just a long, vindicated stare, like a man who has fully lost the plot. It's a baffling final note for a film that handled its emotional beats so well up to that point, and it cost it real goodwill in my books.