Kritiken

It's almost impossible to believe that Kubrick would have gone to such lengths to encode his film with such miscellaneous secrets and subtexts (and even less so that he actually produced the film to coordinate reversals and overlays to such a degree), but together it adds further intrigue to a work that already held the ability to awe and unsettle.

Rodney Ascher's obsessive exploration of a collection of obsessive interpretations of Stanley Kubrick'sThe Shining is full of wit and knowledge, sharply executed and deliriously insightful into the ways we process images and construct meaning in movies. Ascher never makes fun of his entertaining collection of crackpots, but his commitment to them and their analyses is complete. Frame-by-frame, backwards and forwards, the film is deconstructed...

Room 237 adroitly blends several documentary genres. It recalls Cinemania and Ringers in its investigation of fan cultures. But instead of focusing on the personalities and lifestyles of the fans, Ascher concentrates on their readings of the movie. We never see the commentators. In this respect, it evokes the newly emerged genre of video essays as practiced by Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz.

...What (most of the) narrators have in common is a sort of Talmudic faith in the omniscient intentionality of Kubrick—every continuity error, every prop, is analyzed. We don't have to share their Kubrick-deism to be fascinated by the documentary. What ROOM 237 is about, ultimately, is the interaction between audience and art.

This wildly entertaining doc stands as a tribute to the cult of Kubrick, a filmmaker so lionized that even his continuity errors are assumed to be choices. Yet you don't have to believe the crackpot ideas posited by Room 237 to be exhilarated by the way Ascher goes about examining them. His real subject is not The Shining but a belief in the power of any director to invest every frame of his work with meaning. Bring on the subtextual dissections of Pet Sematary.

Room 237 isn't film criticism, it isn't coherent analysis, but listening to fanatics go on and on about their fixations can be kind of fun. For a while, at least.

These clips from other films suggest how a lifetime of casually watching movies (on TV, in theaters, in passing) help shape our minds. Meanwhile, Ascher acts as the sixth conspiracy theorist, stringing together Kubrick's movies and offering ways to look at his work as a whole. "Room 237″ demonstrates by example that overinterpretation, even if misguided, is more fun than passively taking movies in.

Rodney Ascher's extraordinary, copyright-defying documentary "Room 237"... as an introductory primer to the madness and genius of the various "Shining" theories. It does so in hypnotic fashion, stitching together dozens of clips from that film along with Kubrick's other features... and an eclectic range of cinematic touchstones stretching from F.W. Murnau's 1926 "Faust" to "All the President's Men" to the 1982 "Creepshow," a collaboration between King and director George A. Romero.

Part of what makes "Room 237" fascinating to watch and think about (beyond other people's loopiness) is that it shows how works of art become encrusted with their reception. It's a process that has only been accelerated by the Internet, where millions of loony and lovely interpretations bloom.

Room 237 isn't some quirky study of a group of people hung up on a certain movie, but a movie about the power that certain movies possess: a real, troubling, dominating power not just to inspire, entertain, or annoy, but to corrupt the minds and muddle the thoughts of its viewers. It's this uncanny, irreconcilable power that animates the doc. Cinema's the corpse in the bathtub, the skeletons in the ballroom, the elevator full of blood, the guy in a dog costume blowing a ghost in a tuxedo.

Although it's not strictly an experimental film, Rodney Ascher's Room 237 is another work that aims to mesmerize us. Again and again, we are shown the opening images of The Shining (1980): the '70s Warners logo, followed by the narrowing path through the mountains as the credits come up. This sequence is an induction phase; each time it plays, we get a sense of "We're going in."

Ascher allows each voice to speak openly for itself, presenting each theory as equally viable and absurd, rarely suggesting whether he believes it's one or the other—this may be a subtle and rather savvy way of undermining our desire for a strong directorial presence, but in practice it serves only to underline his ambivalence about the readings themselves.