A preview of Room 237 will take place at 21.50 on Thursday, October 25th as part of IFI Horrorthon. A new digital restoration of the extended cut of The Shining will open at the IFI on November 2nd.

As the cinema’s ultimate egghead perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick has always inspired the closest of readings, as this affectionate and spellbinding documentary on the hidden meanings of The Shining makes abundantly clear.

Gathering together a quintet of Overlook obsessives, Rodney Ascher’s smartly assembled tribute proceeds on the basis that if it’s on screen then Stanley intended it to be there, which makes just about anything – from carpet patterns to the number of the guest room with the grisly secret – fair game for interpretative argument.

Cleverly, the film keeps its interviewees off-screen, so their theories stand or fall on their own merits, no matter that they initially seem pretty far-out: is it a metaphor for the Holocaust, the genocide of the American Indians, or somehow connected to the Apollo moon landings? Certainly, you’ll yearn to see Kubrick’s masterpiece of terror one more time, but this is also a salutary and entertaining reminder that movies are always a construct of each viewer’s intelligence and imagination. (Notes by Trevor Johnson.)

A preview of Room 237 will take place at 21.50 on Thursday, October 25th as part of IFI Horrorthon. A new digital restoration of the extended cut of The Shining will open at the IFI on November 2nd.