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Room 237 (2012)
Reviewed on 2013 March 29
I’m going to start this review with a caveat. Since it’s a movie about a movie, you need to be either a movie geek or a Kubrick fan to really enjoy it. I’m both of these — The Shining is one of my favorite films — so I enjoyed it a great deal.
The whole premise of Room 237 is that when he made The Shining, Kubrick wasn’t just adapting a really scary Stephen King novel: he was trying to tell us something. For the next 102 minutes, people who are even greater film nerds than I discuss exactly what. It seems that for every scene in the movie, someone has a theory about Kubrick’s hidden message.
Some of the theories range from a stretch that makes sense (The Shining is a metaphor for man’s inhumanity to man, specifically The Holocaust) to just too much (the moon landings were faked). I would lean towards it being a work against the barbarity of mankind myself, but I personally think if anything was loaded with secret stuff, it would be Eyes Wide Shut. Still, it would explain why the movie deviated from King’s novel so much. As a bonus, it’s loaded with choice film clips from other old movies. If nothing else, think of it as one of those late-night college dorm room talks, put on celluloid and done in technicolor.
Three chocolate morsels. No stuff hidden in them or symbols on the wrapper, just plain morsels.
— Shukti
