Don't Overlook This Crazy Doc

Room 237

***½  out of **** 

Directed by: Rodney Ascher

Running time: 102 minutes

Room 237 is a boffo buffet for film students and conspiracy theorists, a terrific and often bewildering look at cinephilia. Rodney Ascher’s doc played the film festival circuit for more than a year – and it is easy to see why: the film has five different voices presenting their thesis on the deeper subtext and meanings behind Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, a perceived classic of the horror genre.

The five theorists say they believe Kubrick’s revered, although enigmatic thriller tackled territory such as Native American genocide, the Holocaust and Kubrick’s role as the mastermind behind a faked Apollo 11 moon landing. Room 237 is a hypnotic visual essay that is intriguing and also absurdly funny, since the points these theorists make are often incredible or hard to substantiate.

Ascher shows the moments that the film’s enthusiasts are referring to by screening clips from The Shining over their voices, sometimes moving frame-by-frame to capture the particular moment that the film fan refers to.

One commentator reads the iconic scene where gallons of blood pour out from an elevator shaft on the Overlook Hotel’s bottom floor as a metaphor for spilled Indian blood. The Overlook, in the film and Stephen King’s original novel, stands on Native American burial ground; thus, the blood expunged from the elevators is that of a mass grave.

Another theorist reasons that Kubrick made The Shining as a veiled allusion to his role in filming the footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing in a Hollywood backlot. He says he believes that Kubrick planted clues within the settings, design and characters' costume to hint at the director’s involvement with organizing the hoax, and consequently, becoming unable to express his displeasure with the U.S. government.

Among other claims, the theorist ruminates that the mystifying Room 237 within the film, which was Room 217 in King’s novel, was changed to clue in viewers to the Moon’s distance from the earth (237,000 miles).

Unsurprisingly, Room 237 opens with a disclaimer that the commentators’ opinions do not reflect the views of the filmmaker or crew members. However, purists of The Shining, alongside many film enthusiasts, will likely not feel that these interpretations scar the reputation of a classic.

There is room to both chuckle at some of the incongruous commentaries, some of which present flimsy evidence, but also an opportunity to ponder over whether these analyses have credibility or not.

The subjects often muse at how Kubrick, who died in 1999, often tackled controversial themes, and was both a genius and a stylistic perfectionist. The continuity errors and bizarre symbolism must have some significance to the themes and characters, right?

While the author’s intent is unknown, the theorists have fun hypothesizing the events within Kubrick’s life – what he was reading during the 1970s before making The Shining, the cartoons he saw as a young boy growing up during World War 2 – that influence their arguments. The opinions held by the five voices would be problematic in a university-level film essay due to the lack of proof, but are fascinating to watch unfold on the big screen, playing over selected clips.

Ascher deserves credit for giving the recipients fair treatment. None of them are seen; instead, Ascher plays archive clips from other films over the commentators’ voices. For instance, when one of them refers to heading out to see the film, the audience sees a clip from Eyes Wide Shut, as Tom Cruise checks out film posters underneath a theatre marquee.

The fusion of other film clips within a documentary already oriented toward cinema analysis further blurs the lines of subjectivity within the art form. As the audience adapts their impression of these images to suit the speaker’s argument, we further lose ourselves into the power of moving images.

The theories are often outlandish, although the arguers stand firmly entrenched in their reasoning. They find meaning in some of The Shining’s glaring continuity errors: when patterns on the carpet or a chair’s appearance in one scene switches between shots, the theorists insist these mistakes were intentional and have deeply layered subtext that back up their own views.

Ascher does not negate the persuasiveness of the opinions, but lets the audience decide on whether they have credibility or even a shred of sense behind them. He keeps the argument and analysis alive, proving that all of the commentators’ critical work (and no play, considering their fanaticism toward the subject) makes Room 237 not such a dull film.