ROOM 237 (Rodney Ascher) Rating: NNNNN
An exceptional documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and viewers’ obsession with the film’s many mysteries, Room 237 is a lethal love letter to the cinema. The cineastes interviewed by director Rodney Ascher may be trapped by Kubrick’s film like the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel.
Equally Kubrickian is Ascher’s painstaking composition. Assembled largely from The Shining footage, the film is organized around various left-field interpretations. One speaker thinks Kubrick’s copping to faking the moon landing another talks at length about Minotaurs. Some of the theories come off like crackpot close readings.
But Ascher isn’t interested in credibility. Rather, he’s concerned with the spells that films, and especially enigmatic ones like The Shining, can cast.
