Directed by Rodney Ascher
Featuring Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, and Jay Weidner.
An IFC Midnight Release
MPAA Theatrical Rating: None
Audiences looking for the documentary film Room 237 to shed any light on Stanley Kubrick's 1980 classic The Shining, probably walked out of the theater disappointed. As it turns out, Rodney Ascher wasn't out to make a movie about The Shining as much as he was interested in using The Shining to explore obsession. With a vocal and obsessive community of Shining analysts and conspiracy theorists as his subjects, Ascher uses footage from The Shining and voice over narration to chart a path from deep appreciation to wildly spurious speculation about Kubrick's message.
If a film ever invited this kind of frame-by-frame nitpicking, The Shining might be it. Kubrick's meticulous eye for detail and composition don't jive with continuity errors and illogical geography. It's easy enough to make the case that a lot of what doesn't feel or look right in Kubrick's film is there to throw the audience off, but each of the theories in Room 237 goes much farther. The theories suggest that The Shining is about the holocaust, or the displacement of Native Americans, or that it is full of subliminal images. By the end of Ascher's film, I wasn't curious about any of that, but I was fascinated by the lengths to which people had gone to project their own agendas and ideas on a piece of pop art. It also introduced me to The Shining Forwards and Backwards, which is something I need to see in a theater now! -MJ
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