'Room 237': Documentary film about The Shining

Some films are significant, some achieve significance, and some have significance thrust upon them. Stanley Kubrick's mystery horror film The Shining, first seen in 1980, has generated a cult of interpreters and clue-hunters who have extracted – or imposed – meanings unsuspected by the rest of us.

Director Rodney Ascher has spliced together interviews with various Shining theorists, though in voice only, never in appearance, for 'Room 237' a film about what Henry James called the figure in the carpet, the mysterious meaning hidden in plain sight. It's an essay in interpretive heresy and critical dissent.

Ascher declines to approach it in terms of the conventional consensus established by reviewers and pundits. Instead, he talks to fanatical Shining obsessives who have developed outlandish theories and found sensational occult clues in the tiny, subliminally glimpsed details, in the strange perspectives, continuity errors and Escher-like physical inconsistencies in the layout of the Overlook Hotel. Kubrick was himself a detail obsessive, and that fact makes these theories very seductive.

It raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie's significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.

It's pretty enthralling and it will either ruin The Shining forever or else drag you into its obsessive web of conspiracies.

Compiled from reviews: the independent/guardian