LFF: Room 237

In 1980, Stanley Kubrick released The Shining. A horror film adapted from a best-selling Stephen King novel, it divided audiences and critics at the time, though it has latterly been celebrated as one of the director’s masterpieces and remains a chilling standard for the genre. In over 30 years since its release, the cult following the film has garnered includes a number who insist that Kubrick was trying to do something other than just make a scary movie, that he implanted ideas about history and the world we live in throughout the film, littering it with codes to decipher. Rodney Ascher assembles footage from the film, astutely used clips from the director’s work and other archive material, while allowing five authoritative voices to speculate what Kubrick was trying to tell the world when he made The Shining. The theories are appealingly bizarre at times, and while the ideas are often delivered with conviction, there’s plenty of humour evident here. Room 237 is smart and inventive filmmaking that celebrates cinema with wit and originality