Five "experts" discuss their interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as voiceover interviews play over footage from various archival and other film footage.
These are not dumb people. They are historians, professors, researchers, and archivists who fall into the trap of very smart people saying very dumb things. The entire movie feels like an English Literature class in college where you're asked to close read a work for the first time. The point of the exercise is not to discover the "true intent"; it's to show how varied the interpretations can be. And yes, if you spend your entire career studying a particular facet of history, like the genocide of the Native Americans in the American West, or the Holocaust, you will then start seeing connections everywhere. That is how human pattern-seeking works. It is also how conspiracy theories work, that you've "figured it out" because you're so much smarter than other people, so of course you're going to be persecuted by the Government, as one gentleman dolefully expects to be audited by the IRS as punishment for speaking out about his theory that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 footage of the moon landing.
I suppose you could find this documentary entertaining in a "Boy, what won't they think of" kind of way but I did not. It felt a little mean-spirited considering that some of these people seem genuinely mentally ill, while others were infuriatingly condescending. I don't find that funny. And the film itself doesn't question or present a point of view of its own, so it just comes off as a bunch of people ranting. Again, that is not my thing. If it's yours or you just really, really like The Shining and/or Kubrick and/or insane conspiracy theories, Room 237 is streaming on Shudder and AMC+.
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