It can’t be because she’s over the top. It’s true that the acting of Shelley Duvall in Stanley Kubrick’s unsurpassed horror masterpiece The Shining is pitched to an upper register. A quavering voice that gives way to high-pitched screeches, eyes that grow wider and wider like some kind of “Black Hole Sun” special effect, the general impression that if you made a loud enough noise she might actually explode.
..I’m not denying that this is cranked-to-eleven acting.
It’s just that Jack Nicholson is also in this movie, you may recall, and he’s so far over the top he achieves low earth orbit. You think anything Duvall does in this movie is wilder or weirder than “Here’s Johnny”? Bless your heart. But a great actor is gone, and it behooves us to wrestle with the historical record regarding her greatest role.
I would argue that the issue detractors have with Duvall as Wendy Torrance — the terrified wife of her increasingly unhinged novelist and alcoholic (but I repeat myself, haha) husband Jack, with whom she is snowbound together with their psychic son Danny in the extremely haunted Rocky Mountain getaway called the Overlook Hotel — isn’t that she’s far-out or over-stylized in her performance. Kubrick fans by this point had enjoyed the star turns of Peter Sellers, Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Shelly Winters, Sterling Hayden, and Malcolm McDowell, to say nothing of Nicholson himself. (Okay, Keir Dullea and Ryan O’Neal are kind of outliers in the charis.
