Review of Room 237 (2012) by Tibor B — 24 Apr 2013

An entertaining footnote to Stanley Kubrick's great horror/freakout film The Shining, which gathers a handful of bedroom theorists together and allows them to put forward their own personal theories and observations behind the film.

These range from the film being a huge calculated metaphor for mass persecution, notably the Holocaust and the Red Indians, to it being a cryptic whistle-blow that Kubrick aided the US Government fake the Apollo moon landing footage along with some continuity, set design and framing observations that may help explain the film's profoundly unsettling psychological effect.

The larger theories are quite fun to hear out, however tenuous, but what does become clear is that Kubrick's impeccably calculated mise en scene and shooting style does contain a huge amount of planned and designed visual information, precisely the reason why people find hidden meanings at both a visual and metaphorical level and search for more depth with such tenacity.

One neat detail I liked was a playful Kubrick jab at The Shining's author Stephen King. The red Volkswagen in King's novel is replaced by a yellow car, with a red one later shown wrecked under a truck in a snowstorm.

Many of the details picked up on are hard to write off and dismiss as coincidence when you remember how everything in a film, especially with kubrick at the helm, is so precisely calculated. It certainly makes a repeat watch of The Shining a must.