Jack Torrance [Steven Weber] is an alcoholic with an explosive temper that cost him his teaching job and now threatens his family after he assaults his 7-year-old son Danny Torrance [Courtland Mead] in a drunken rage. His wife, Wendy Torrance [Rebecca De Mornay] is horrified and fears for their safety, realizing that another slip could drive him away for good, or worse, put them all in grave danger.
As part of his sobriety plan, Jack takes a high-paying job as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a secluded Colorado resort perched in the mountains. The assignment promises isolation that might give him the space and time to finish his first play, but it also isolates the family from the world they know and trust. The echoes of the hotel’s former grandeur loom large as winter closes in, setting the stage for a slow, inward descent.
Danny discovers he can communicate telepathically with the Overlook’s head cook, Dick Hallorann, who tells the boy that he, too, "shines." Hallorann departs on a mandatory vacation, but he leaves Danny a lifeline—a warning that he will hear help if Danny ever needs it, no matter how far away Hallorann may be. Danny’s gift also attracts the attention of malevolent forces within the hotel, which reveal themselves through visions and creeping dread. Danny is not alone in his awareness; he is visited by Tony, Wil Horneff, an older persona who shows him glimpses of the events to come and adds another layer to the mystery surrounding the hotel’s power.
Jack’s connection to the hotel grows darker as he becomes more fixated on the building’s history. He spends long hours in the mansion’s memorabilia-crammed basement, chasing clues that seem to pull him deeper into a malignant past. Danny, meanwhile, confides to his mother that his father has become increasingly hostile and obsessed, a change that fills the family with fear even as they try to hold on to normalcy. Wendy’s instinct to leave clashes with Jack’s insistence that he must stay and confront the past for the sake of their future, and the motel’s eerie quiet amplifies every tremor of doubt.
The Overlook begins to offer Jack more than stories and memories; it invites him to drink again with a strange, almost supernatural hospitality. A voice from the past—his late father’s echo on the hotel’s CB radio—tells him that Danny must be punished. In a furious mistake, Jack smashes the radio, severing any remaining direct link to help or sanity. Meanwhile, Danny encounters the ghost of a woman who committed suicide on the premises; she reaches out with a chilling whisper and a doomed warning, grabbing him as if trying to pull him into the hotel’s past tragedies. The moment is etched in the family’s memory as one of the first, unmistakable signs that the hotel will not let them leave unscathed.
The danger escalates as the family discovers Danny’s bruises and lipstick marks, the telltale signs of a guided force at work. He reveals that the ghosts compelled him to enter Room 217, a forbidden chamber whose history is steeped in death and malice. Hallorann’s earlier conviction that the ghosts cannot hurt them proves tragically wrong in the hotel's cruel inertia. Wendy tries to escape, but Jack sabotages the snowmobile—their lone chance to flee through the brutal winter—further trapping them inside the hotel’s white, frozen maw.
A desperate Danny shines to Hallorann, who rushes from Florida to locate the boy and his mother. The Overlook’s spirits invite Jack into a shuttered ballroom and tempt him with alcohol, hosting a dark party that features the long-dead guests of the hotel. Delbert Grady, the Overlook’s former caretaker who murdered his family and killed himself, tends the bar and urges Jack toward a bloody destiny: he belongs in this world of depravity, but first he must murder his family and Hallorann.
Wendy’s quick thinking saves Danny, as she knocks Jack unconscious and locks him in a cooler. The two siblings resolve that the menace isn’t their father but the malevolent hotel that has possessed him. Yet Grady frees Jack, who resumes his assault on Wendy while Danny hides in the shadows. Wendy’s screams draw Hallorann’s attention, and he is attacked by Jack in a brutal confrontation, a clash the hotel’s walls seem to savor.
Delbert Grady’s grim warnings echo through the corridors as the fuse in the hotel’s boiler grows dangerously near to detonation. Derwent, the hotel’s founder, sends Jack to fetch Danny, but Wendy and Hallorann rally to escape. Tony returns to Danny’s side, guiding him to a vital truth: the boiler is about to explode, and the hotel’s doom is imminent. Danny focuses his power on his father, who briefly wrestles back toward conscience before the truth about the boiler pulls him away. Jack races to stop the catastrophe, his mind split between the living world and the hotel’s malignant influence, but Danny’s shining heart and steadfast courage help him find the way back, and he reverses the valve to avert disaster—yet it costs him his life. The massive steam explosion destroys the Overlook, taking Jack with it.
Ten years pass, and Danny is now a high school graduate, around seventeen, bearing the faint resemblance to Tony’s older visage. Wendy and Hallorann are present, as is Jack’s benevolent spirit, which lingers to tell Danny that he loves him. In Colorado, crews work to rebuild what was lost, and the hotel’s ghosts are heard again, still playing croquet as the echoes of the past mingle with the present, a haunting reminder that some worlds never fully let go.
