Room 237

In 1980 Stanley Kubrick released his classic horror film, The Shining. Over 30 years later, viewers are still struggling to understand its hidden meanings.

Loved and hated by equal numbers, the film is considered a genre standard by many loyalists, while other viewers dismiss it as the lazy result of a legendary director working far below his talent level. In between these two poles, however, live the theories of ardent fans who are convinced they have decoded The Shining’s secret messages regarding genocide, government conspiracy, and the nightmare that we call history. Room 237 fuses fact and fiction through interviews with five fans and scholars who espouse these theories with wildly different ideas about the film's true meaning. This documentary seamlessly interweaves these sometimes far-fetched topics in a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of the horror classic. Using only visuals from Kubrick's oeuvre and a few other select films, this is an incredible study in how the chaos of madness sometimes has an underlying grid of sanity.