Room 237

What?  You've never seen a film played backwards superimposed over it playing forwards before?  What have you been doing with your life??

Not very often you get to say 'I've never seen a film like that before' - if you watch a lot of films. Just goes to show it can still happen though because, here we go :  'I've never seen a film like that before'.

The film in question is Room 237.  It's a documentary film composed of interviews with people who have theories about deep symbolic meanings in Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining. You never see the people - the visuals are made up of clips from The Shining and other films.

The theories range from the somewhat plausible to the downright bloody crazy.  The whole film is about the murder of Native Americans, it's about the holocaust, it's intended to be played backwards as well as forwards with one superimposed over the other.  Oh, and it's an apology for Kubrick's involvement in faking the footage of the moon landings.

There are tangibly strange things about the film which are pointed out - other than the background strangeness of the film itself of course - such as furniture which disappears from one frame to the other and carpets that seem to have been moved under the characters.  They look like continuity errors but that would be unlikely given Kubrick's eye for detail.

Still, there is no need to analyse the claims of the participants, or even understand them. There is something intrinsically fascinating in listening to people with wacky theories expounding them with that little secret thrill in their voice.  And it's just nerdishly satisfying to witness a work of art being deconstructed to such an extent.

The whole thing works as a celebration of this type of analysis and perhaps a satire of it.  
A collaborative satire, though.  The interviewees are never mocked, but you do feel the film-maker is more interested in the fact that they theorise like this than in the theories themselves.  
And so are we.

It made me think about religion and all those other fantasies - how a web can be weaved of such captivating intricacy, just looking at the web makes you a prisoner.

Some of my favourite ever films are documentaries - such as The King of Kong : A Fistful of Quarters and Anvil.  And this film is right up there with them.  A fantastic companion piece to the original Kubrick masterpiece - although it would no doubt work on its own.  Mind you, I'd be surprised if you didn't want to see the original to work out for yourself just what is going on with that impossible window...