Ascher's fascinating, nutty, cleverly edited film is aimed at a somewhat specialist audience of movie fans obsessed with Stanley Kubrick's upmarket horror flick, The Shining. The movie stars Jack Nicholson as an increasingly deranged writer, working as winter caretaker with his wife and six-year-old son at a labyrinthine luxury hotel in the American Rockies where another caretaker butchered his wife and twin daughters a decade earlier. It's a fascinating, enigmatic film, deeply pessimistic about human nature like all Kubrick's work, and Ascher has consulted five assorted Kubrick students – a professor of history, a performance artist, a veteran network TV reporter, a playwright, and an "erudite conspiracy hunter" – to examine the film in detail and its place in the Master's oeuvre. One thinks it's about the Holocaust, another the annihilation of Native Americans, a third sees in it a coded account of how Kubrick conspired with Nasa to fake the Apollo 11 moon landing, while one thinks The Shining can only be understood by simultaneously showing the film backwards and forwards with one version superimposed on the other. A picture as riveting as being buttonholed by the Ancient Mariner, it's best visited after seeing the longer, restored version of The Shining that opens next week. The package however should bear King Lear's warning: "That way madness lies."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/oct/28/room-237-the-shining-documentary
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