In the last sequence of The Shining, the face of Jack Torrance, frozen to death in the labyrinth, a prisoner forever of Hotel Overlook, evokes a death mask. This image echoes a black and white photograph in which Jack, in evening dress, poses amidst hotel guests during a 4th of July ball in 1921. This sequence crystallises the film's fundamental ambiguity: has Jack Torrance, victim of his inner demons, become one more ghost who will haunt the hotel in turn? Or else had he frequented this place inhabited by phantoms, in an earlier life, in 1921?
Jack Nicholson's face is the most terrifying element of the film. Stanley Kubrick chose the actor for the extraordinary mobility of his features. In the same shot, he is able to change his expression from affectionate father to demon possessed by a destructive urge. Thanks to the actor, Kubrick reveals an inner mask of the character, which ends up coming to the surface, a mask that organises the face into a unique expression, creating uneasiness by the fixedness of his features or, to contrary, by their grotesque mobility.
The progressive possession of Jack by the spectres haunting the hotel (real phantoms or projections of his imagination?) is made visible by the metamorphoses of his physiognomy: on several occasions, as he strolls through the hotel, fixed shots show his features frozen as if haunted, expressing an inner threat. In the scene where he carries on a dialogue with the murderer-former caretaker (whose face also resembles a mask), a sort of transmission from one to the other is established through grimaces and grins.
Jack's "dehumanisation" concludes in the final scene of the pursuit in the maze, a sort of journey of death and transfiguration: Jack, armed with an axe, disappears into the meanders of the white labyrinth like a Minotaur, brow lowered and short of wind.