If you can believe that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining vouchsafes subtexts that include the Holocaust, the plight of American Indians, the breakdown of family values and the theory that the Moon landing was faked, then Rodney Ascher’s film will intrigue you.
It has conversations and commentaries from various fans and scholars who espouse these theories, a multitude of clips from both the film itself and other horror-thrillers and a half-serious decoding of the symbols and messages said to lie within The Shining.
Perhaps significantly, we begin with a written disclaimer from both the Kubrick family trust and those who worked on the film. What Kubrick himself would have felt we can’t know, but it might have been exasperated.
Fortunately Ascher’s opus is decently put together and fun to watch, but more as the product of a geeky fan than a writer-director of real imagination. There are, after all, puzzles in The Shining, which is so perfectly detailed that it must all mean something, but the question remains whether Ascher has prized out much of real value.
