The Enigma of the Overlook and the Humility of Philosophy: A Critical Reflection on Phenomenological, Hermeneutic, and Spatial Readings of The Shining

Abstract Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) presents far more than a psychological narrative of madness and violence. Through the architecture of the Overlook Hotel, the film raises a deeper ontological question concerning the possibility of dwelling in a world whose spatial, temporal, and historical structures no longer provide a stable horizon for human existence. Rather than treating the film as an illustration of pre-existing philosophical theories, this article approaches it as a critical test of their explanatory capacities. Drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s notion of uncanniness, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception, Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity and temporality, and Michel Foucault’s concepts of heterotopia and spatial power, the article examines both the insights and the limitations of these frameworks in confronting the enigma of the Overlook Hotel. The central argument is that while each philosophical perspective illuminates particular dimensions of the film, none succeeds in exhausting its meaning. The Shining persistently resists totalizing interpretations and, in doing so, calls philosophy itself toward epistemic humility. The value of philosophical reflection, therefore, lies not in closing questions through definitive explanations but in preserving the openness of inquiry in the face of irreducible ambiguity. Keywords: The Shining, uncanniness, embodied perception, poetics of space, narrative identity, heterotopia, epistemic humility