Trending: Shining a light on conspiracy theories

Stanley Kubrick's horror masterpiece The Shining is the director's take on the Holocaust. Or is it about the treatment of Native Americans? Or numerology? Or how Kubrick – fresh from filming 2001: A Space Odyssey – was behind the faked filming of the moon landings?

Look on YouTube and you'll see dozens of well-researched takes on theories like these about the 1980 classic. The best are collected in Room 237, which debuted at Sundance in January and is being screened at Cannes.

Room 237, from director Rodney Ascher, features five interviewees steeped in Kubrick, conspiracy and the film itself, who explain, using clips, their ideas. The most outlandish involves Danny (Jack Nicholson's son in the film) who, as he enters the haunted Room 237 in his Apollo 11 jumper – on a carpet that looks like Nasa's control room – is said to represent Kubrick and his supposed participation in filming the "faked" moon landings in 1969. The others are just as colourful [i.e. that the frequent nods to the No 42 refer to the year of the Nazis' Final Solution].

Since the film relies on clips from other films it might not make it past the lawyers. But Variety has called it "one of the great movies about movies". If it doesn't get released, expect new conspiracy theories to bloom.