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Directed by Rodney Ascher, Room 237 is a documentary that examines several intriguing interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s much-praised 1980 horror film The Shining, which was based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name. The documentary is essentially criticism in a moving image medium, combining voiceovers with innovatively edited scenes from Kubrick’s films, similar to the film-essay style of Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), a documentary analysis of movies inspired by, or shot in, Los Angeles. Room 237 shows both real-time and slowed down scenes from The Shining, with many scenes repeated to allow for alternative interpretations. Its title refers to the mysterious room that seduces Jack Nicholson’s character Jack Torrance and his son Danny, while also alluding to The Shining itself as similarly seducing audiences with its mysterious cinematic language.
Each of the documentary’s five interviewees—Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan and Jay Weidner—apply a microscopic analysis to scenes that could only have been formulated through multiple viewings, as if inflicted with the same obsessiveness that drove Kubrick. This obsessiveness was the subject of an excellent documentary in 2008 titled Kubrick’s Boxes, which explores the filmmaker’s legendary research processes, his unfinished projects, hoarding, and probable Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It is partly Kubrick’s obsessiveness that makes many of the interpretations in Room 237 sound more plausible than they should. Kubrick, who began his career as a photographer, is notorious for imbuing each frame of his movies with semiological significance; each film a system of signs, each frame a unit of meaning.
In late-2012 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) contextualised Kubrick’s career in terms of the visual arts, highlighting his enormous