In 1980 Stanley Kubrick released his classic horror film The Shining. Over 30 years later, viewers are still struggling to understand its hidden meanings. Loved and hated in equal numbers, the film is considered a genre standard by many loyalists, while other viewers dismiss it as the lazy result of a legendary director working far below his talent level. Between these two poles, however, live the theories of ardent fans convinced they have decoded The Shining’s secret messages regarding genocide, government conspiracy, and the nightmare that we call history. Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 fuses fact and fiction through interviews with the fans and scholars who espouse these theories. The ideas of five devotees of the film with wildly different ideas about its true meaning are braided together in a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of the horror classic.

A huge hit at Sundance and selected for the prestigious Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, Room 237 is one of the wildest, most entertaining and unexpected films of the year. It will draw you into a new maze, one with endless detours and dead ends, with many ways in, but no way out. See it and discover why many have been trapped in the Overlook for 30 years.