Obsessive cineastes detail their byzantine conspiracy theories about the secret themes and messages hidden within Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, in director Rodney Ascher's fascinating, kaleidoscopic deconstruction of a horror classic.
Official Selection, Toronto International Film Festival 2012
Directors' Fortnight, Festival de Cannes 2012
Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2012
Ever since Stanley Kubrick's The Shining was first unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1980, it has exerted an extraordinary hold over viewers' imaginations. Taking its title from the mysterious room in The Shining's haunted Overlook Hotel that might hold the key to the building's deadly secret, Rodney Ascher's Room 237 is not a behind-the-scenes making-of or a tribute to Kubrick's horror masterpiece; rather, it's a brilliant, hilarious, and sometimes eerie cinematic soapbox for five obsessive cineastes whose theories about the cryptic themes and hidden messages in The Shining are Byzantine, outrageous, and maybe — just maybe — true. One theorizer believes that The Shining is an allegory for the genocide of Native Americans, another an allegory for the Holocaust; one focuses on the "impossible" architecture of the Overlook, while another weaves in the conspiracy theory that Kubrick artificially staged and filmed the Apollo 11 moon landings to read The Shining as his subliminal apology for his deception. Keeping his five subjects offscreen and using their ruminations as voiceover narration, Ascher allows each to expound their hypotheses while illustrating their examples with key scenes from The Shining — and while some of these theories may be too wild to ever be believed, by immersing the audience in Kubrick's brilliant visuals Ascher intimates that there may indeed be a method in these various madnesses. Both a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of a horror classic and a portrait of truly fanatical obsession, Room 237 is one of the year's most fascinating documentaries.