a poignant portrait of mental illness
After watching this I realized that this was only tangentially a movie about Stanley Kubrick or The Shining. It was actually and much more directly a documentary about a group of disparate people in the throes of the same mental illness--a clinical, rabid obsession with the first thing that came along. If it hadn't been The Shining that was the object of their fixation, it would have been something else--anything else; it almost didn't matter what they were obsessed with. As different as their theories all seem, the theorists all seem to have three things in common:
1) Like all conspiracy theorists, they have a firm belief that there is an actual pattern to or explanation for the world--that there is a deliberate plan or plot behind everything. This leads to people making leaps--often wild, unsubstantiatable leaps--to shore up their preset point of view.
2) They all believe in the utter infallibility and almost godlike perfection of Stanley Kubrick. Despite people's best efforts, movies, like every other human endeavor, are often full of continuity errors and other types of mistakes. But their belief that Kubrick was immune to this or any type of human error means that things in The Shining{ that most people would chalk up to normal, insignificant mistakes are assumed by these folks to be deliberate and therefore meaningful choices by Kubrick. Just because Kubrick was a perfectionist does not mean that he was incapable of making the usual mistakes that are sometimes the result of the normal filmmaking process.
3) They all (or mostly) seem to have mental illnesses that elevate the first two beliefs into full-blown, all-consuming obsessions.