As any student of any art form knows and fears, the moment you begin to study a particular text, film, or other piece of art is the moment it falls apart and becomes a gaping corpse of functional, practical parts ready to be dissected and reassembled in any Frankenstein manner you wish. Movie fans love to discuss movies, to look for tiny specs on re-watches that you or others may have missed, while critics prefer to cut the thing apart to find any minor details which they can ascribe to their own agenda. Somewhere between or beyond these groups is another breed which goes further, seeking to fuel their own fan-fiction, conspiracy theories, or venomous, stalker-lite love. Room 237 is a basement dweller’s blood-written love-letter to Kubrick, an interesting, ridiculous, and beyond believable account of people who have slipped out of fandom and into hysteria. Like any good conspiracy, it’s well worth listening to so that you can either point and laugh, nod and walk away, or think to yourself that maybe these guys have a point after all….
Room 237 specifically examines Kubrick’s The Shining, but also takes reference points from Kubrick’s life and other movies. Movie fans and critics alike will enjoy hearing pieces of information on the director and his movies that they may not have heard before, as well as marveling at the tenuous connections that our wonderfully, creatively flawed minds can make. We hear from general fans and academics, we hear theories which rank from the distantly plausible to the completely ludicrous. It’s easy to make such reaches when Kubrick was such a clever, divisive character with openly dense films. Your appreciation of this documentary will likely depend on how much of a Kubrick fan you are, and how much you enjoy taking an issue to its least logical endpoint or listening to others do the same. Personally I do enjoy this sort of thing but eventually it does become tiresome – Room 237 repeats the same footage, and has the same bland voices rambling on, so your patience may be tested long before the credits are rolling.
I was planning to go into more detail and maybe add another paragraph, but I think it’s best for those interested to go into this with an open mind – it isn’t essential for Kubrick or King fans, but it is made by and features people with a love both dedicated and a little disturbing for the works discussed. Let us know in the comments what you thought of Room 237 and what your favourite movie related conspiracy theories are.
The Spac Hole 