Who ordered the Shining-lite? Riding home after an evening of party games with friends set their marital skiff reeling towards the rocks, wife Neda (Niousha Jafarian) insists that for the sake of their infant daughter sleeping in the back seat, her just-drunk-enough-not-to-drive husband Babak (Shahab Hosseini) find a nearby hotel. Their GPS is on the fritz, but the Iranian transplants chance upon Los Angeles’ stately Hotel Normandie, a division of the Overlook Hotel Group. As if the back alley entryway wouldn’t be enough to scare them in the direction of the closest La Quinta, there to greet them is the concierge (a superlative George Maguire, putting a sardonic spin on prissy Franklin Pangborn) who has seen too much. Still, that doesn’t mean he’s unwilling to recount in graphic detail the litany of real life tragedies he has witnessed. (Given rise to?) Through these haunted halls pass, in repetition, a convention of ghouls — an unintelligible but nonetheless imposing homeless guy (Elester Latham), the little boy pounding on the back door calling for his mama, and a phantasmagorical female drifting about the end of the hall. As they do, they lose potency rather than accruing fright. Long after the doppelgängers cease ganging up and Neda syncs up with the voices in Babak’s head, director Kourosh Ahari’s pacing remains such that, were it not for the frequent punctuation of loud sounds, even the most well-rested in the crowd would still succumb to drowsiness. Final thought while the closing credits rolled: for 105 minutes, we watched and waited for a movie to become a painting. (2020) — Scott Marks