You never see Mr. Cocks in “Room 237,” though if you visit the Albion College Web site, you can peek at his photo and check out his academic bona fides. In broad terms “Room 237” is a nonfiction movie — its human and cinematic subjects are real enough — but it’s more of a personal essay than a traditional documentary, specifically in its truth claims. Its five interviewees are chatty (most are men, unsurprising given the film-nerd world), whose voice-overs accompany a stream of visuals. Most of the images have mostly been plucked from “The Shining,” but Mr. Ascher also draws on other Kubrick titles, including “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Barry Lyndon,” along with an assortment of archival material.

Image Rodney Ascher, the director of "Room 237." Credit... Joseph Cultice/IFC Midnight

Mr. Cocks, whose books include “The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust,” proves the most rational of these voices because, however tenuously, he grounds his interpretation both in history and the visible evidence that is “The Shining” itself. “Why a German typewriter,” he asks, as Mr. Ascher shows the machine in question. An Adler (“eagle” in German), it sits ominously on a desk in the Overlook, where each day Jack Torrance (Mr. Nicholson) tries to untap his genius. It’s the same one on which he types — again and again — “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” — the refrain that Kubrick, with music, camera moves, framing and a smothering air of dread, transforms into a portent of evil.

That the typewriter changes color in the film doesn’t shake Mr. Cocks. For him the machine is a crucial referent as is the repeat of the number 42 (which appears on a jersey and elsewhere). “If you put the number 42 and a German typewriter together,” Mr. Cocks says, “you get the Holocaust.” All right — but what does that mean? No one says, but, like a dutifully literal (or sly) student, Mr. Ascher illustrates this part of Mr. Cocks’s thesis by cutting from the notorious tsunami of blood in “The Shining” to a photo of Auschwitz and then back to Kubrick’s red wave. “Because it was in 1942,” Mr. Cocks continues, “that the Nazis made the decision to go ahead and exterminate all the Jews they could. And they did so in a highly mechanical” — Mr. Ascher cuts back to the typewriter — “industrial and bureaucratic way.”

That sounds bonkers and close to a trivialization of a historical catastrophe, even if Mr. Cocks presents a case that’s reinforced by Kubrick’s interest in the Holocaust (it was the subject of one of his unrealized projects, “Aryan Papers”) and by the evil throbbing throughout “The Shining.” The problem is that his reading, at least here, doesn’t resonate as anything but a deeply personal, even private interpretation. The four other interviewees in “Room 237,” including the entertaining Bill Blakemore, a correspondent for ABC News, advance even less persuasive arguments about Kubrick’s film that are tethered, at times laughably, to what could be just resonant props, continuity errors or — as with a carpet design — tantalizing, teasing emblems of Kubrick’s oft-repeated interest in puzzles and enigmas.

Mr. Ascher doesn’t overtly comment on these theories, although his comical insertion of Tom Cruise smashing one gloved hand into another in “Eyes Wide Shut” — to represent the interviewees thinking super-hard — strongly conveys an amused, ironic detachment. Like “The Shining” and its maze within a maze, Mr. Ascher’s movie is something of a labyrinth. Puzzling your way through its compilation of vaguely lucid and crackpot ideas is pleasurable though, for avid movie lovers, it may also feel like a warning. To listen to one other interviewee, Juli Kearns, talk about an “impossible window” in the Overlook (“It’s like a character in itself, it takes over”), you are reminded (again!) of Susan Sontag’s declaration that “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”