Film Review: Stay Out of “Room 237″

For anyone who considers himself a fan of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, attendance to the new documentary Room 237 seems to be a no-brainer.

The original “Don’t Go In There!” moment…

An attempt at exposing secret messages, hidden meanings and political statements that were supposedly the actual driving forces behind Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece, Room 237 is just one huge, absurd mess. What it wants to be is a film that finds the cinematic needle in a Kubreckian haystack, but what 237 unfortunately gives the audience is a needle in a stack of plain ol’ needles. The theories of the 5 “experts” are so poorly and confusingly presented that it almost does not matter that they make no sense in the first place. Consequently, Room 237 becomes oddly indecipherable.

Example: presenter Juli Kearns attempts (and ultimately fails) to convince the audience that the poster of a skier in the background of one scene is actually not a skier but rather a minotaur, which she says proves Kubrick wanted The Shining to be an adaptation of the Greek mythology of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Nope, that’s a skier…

With 20 minutes of the film left to spare, the audience in one particular screening in Los Angeles was beginning to laugh at the increasingly ridiculous and unfounded conclusions the presenters were drawing.

Unfortunately, the best advice for anyone who is considering seeing Room 237 comes from Kubrick’s source material itself, in the character of Dick Halloran at the 4:43 mark here

 

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