Review #178: Room 237 (2012)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #33: Room 237 (2012)

So, I've complained about (or at least mentioned) some of the movies on this list not exactly being horror, but this one really takes the cake. Close your eyes for a moment, and come with me as we try to put ourselves into the mindset of someone making a bucket list of 100 horror films- a person who not only chooses NOT to put The Shining onto that list, but somehow has the bright idea to put a DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE SHINING onto the list instead?

I got nothing. I really have no clue what Room 237 is doing on this list, and I assert that it had to have been some kind of huge oversight. Considering how many examples of movies AND their remakes there are on this list, it doesn't seem out of the question that they meant to put both The Shining and Room 237 on there. But somehow, one of the two (and not the one that makes any sense) ended up getting cut and nobody caught it.

But whatever, it's on the list so I watched it.

Let me make a correction: this isn't actually a documentary about The Shining- it doesn't have any sort of behind-the-scenes footage, or interviews with anyone involved in making it. It's a documentary about the conspiracy theories and urban legends that people have come up with regarding the award-winning film (except even saying that makes this documentary seem more interesting than it is). To give an example of what I mean, one of the first segments in Room 237 is about how Stanley Kubrick clearly meant The Shining to be an apology to the native Americans that were wronged in the 1700s, and the evidence given to support this claim is that in an early scene of The Shining, there's a can of baking powder with a native American on it that's visible on-screen. That's the caliber we're talking about here.

I think this documentary is incredibly stupid. To give a shred of fairness, I don't know what the documentarian's intentions were making this, and for all I know they were laughing at the subjects' claims the whole time. Heck, maybe even the subjects were improv artists making up the wildest and least-substantiated theories they could come up with on the spot. But the problem is, so much of this sounds 100% identical to the kinds of things people ascribe to the auteur of their choice in online discourse, so as sad as it is, I'm positive there are people that believe this kind of nonsense.

Because hey, I'm part of various communities that hold certain media creators up to an impossibly high standard. I'm a huge fan of the Dark Souls video game series, whose creator has built up a reputation (similar to Stanley Kubrick) of meticulously planning every little detail, so that when you see something that either doesn't make sense or makes a shred of sense when slotted into some bewildering hypothesis, there's plenty of evidence that this was all planned from the beginning. But after seeing people in my own community bending over backwards to fit together details that I guarantee had no thought or intention behind them, watching people do the same thing with miniscule details in The Shining feels so familiar to me that I can't write them off as a joke.

But it's absurd. I don't care how many takes Stanley Kubrick was famous for forcing the actors to do, 100% of the stuff presented in Room 237 can only have been a post-hoc byproduct at best, and completely unintended at worst. This documentary is 102 minutes of people looking for patterns where there are none, finding something through the process of pareidolia, and ascribing intention to it, while presenting it with enthusiasm and a straight face. No, Stanley Kubrick did not airbrush his face onto the clouds during the opening credits. No, the hotel manager was not intended to stand next to a paper tray to make it look like he had a giant erection right as he was shaking Jack Torrence's hand. No, there are not secrets to be found if you superimpose the film on top of itself in reverse while playing the film forwards. No, Stanley Kubrick did not fake the moon landing. No, The Shining is not a treasure map leading you to proof of the faked moon landing. I promise you, just because you see patterns when you try to look for patterns doesn't mean there are, in fact, patterns.

I think the simple truth is that, while Kubrick was a well-known perfectionist and he often had a specific vision for what he wanted, he was human like the rest of us. Continuity errors happen. Coincidences happen. Unfounded leaps of logic happen. I also think it's incredibly telling that every single hypothesis put forth in this documentary is entirely visual (a specific image, a prop visible in the shot, a carpet pattern, a poster on a wall, the layout of a room not fitting the layout of the previous room, etc.) and none of them ever included an auditory element. Was Stanley Kubrick unable to send coded messages and metaphors via the soundtrack, or did he just choose not to?

If you want to see a whole bunch of people who don't understand everything that goes into making a film, and you just want to hear them spout a bunch of nonsense while clips of The Shining play in the background, then go ahead and watch Room 237. But I don't recommend it.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Clearly Intended Continuity Errors

Best Bit of IMDB Trivia: "Leon Vitali, former assistant to Stanley Kubrick, dismissed the theories in this film as 'gibberish,' saying they are entirely without merit."