ROOM 237 Review

ROOM 237 Review

By Darin Skaggs

     At first glance Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 seems like a movie about crazy people with too much time on their hands who have spent way too much time thinking and making theories about Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shinning.  And while it is about crazy theories the film is also about so much more.

     Like I said the film takes these people and they say what they think The Shinning is trying to tell us.  Some of the theories include how the film is about how this is Kubrick’s confession on how he played a part in faking the moon landing because the kid in the film is wearing an Apollo shirt, or if you play the film backwards and forwards at the same time many shots of two people talking has another character in the middle almost watching them.  My personal favorite is that while a character is trying to get to the hotel that the family is staying at he sees a semi-truck has crushed a red Volkswagen.  The film was based on a book by Stephen King and Kubrick decided not to follow the book, changing many things.  One of the minor things he changed is that Jack, the main character, drives a red Volkswagen yet in the film he drives a yellow one.  So the man’s theory is that the crushed Volkswagen is a message that this is his story not King’s.

     Half way through the film I wondered why the director only focused on theories of The Shinning and not any other of Kubrick’s films or really any other film at all.  All this was interesting to watch, but besides listening to these regular people talking about what they care and think about, I found out this film is about how art can affect people and make them think.  So many people can look at The Shinning and see a great horror movie or they can see a movie about a crazy person or a man confessing faking the moon landing.  All this could happen with any piece of art.  You could look at the Mona Lisa and see a good or bad painting of a women, someone else could look at it and see a women in love or a women in a state of depression.  They could even see a women feeling both those things. 

That is what makes this film so amazing that it is living proof that anyone could consume a song, TV show, movie, painting, sculpture or speech and have so many different emotional and intellectual thoughts on it.  If you’re a true film fan it will rejuvenate your film mind and you may never look at anything the same ever again.