That Shawshank holds

nominations, losing to the likes of Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, but it bested them to become the top-rented movie of 1995. Ted Turner started blasting it all over TNT and TBS, where it has aired more than 100 times, says Michael Quigley, the networks’ executive vice-president of content acquisitions and strategy, helping it become one of the few movies ‘‘made by cable’’.

Shawshank works particularly well on a small screen. It’s a relationship study with few vistas or intricacies – and no human being who’s seen it before can change the channel before the final payoff. Urban Dictionary even has a term for ‘‘the condition of having been sucked in by a highly watchable movie while channel surfing’’: Shawshanked.

The film has made a number of best-of-all-time Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman and, inset, the Ohio State Reformatory, where much of Shawshank was set. lists: AFI’s updated top 100 movies (No 72), an Empire magazine poll (No 4), the Writers Guild of America’s greatest screenplays (No 22). But Shawshank transcended mere eyeworm status when it hit No 1 on IMDb in 1997. It fell to second place for much of the aughts (typically below The Godfather), before reclaiming the title in 2008, eventually racking up 2.1 million votes.

Everyone has a theory behind its popularity. ‘‘I think of this as a love story – two men who just totally bonded,’’ Freeman says. ‘‘At the very end of the movie, when they hook up – it’s complete.’’

‘‘That friendship doesn’t involve car chases or skirt chasing or typical buddy movie kind of things,’’ Robbins says. ‘‘These different characters grow based on the relationship with each other. It’s a rare thing – not a lot of movies are like that.’’

There are other areas to pan for meaning. Andy is a messianic figure – in the rooftop scene, he’s surrounded by 12 beerdrinking ‘‘disciples’’. But Andy doesn’t use religion; he saves others through the prison library, and himself through a movie poster. He rebels by playing Mozart over the loudspeaker. On the podcast Unpooled, Amy Nicholson (an occasional Post contributor) points out that he fights off a rapist by smacking one with a film reel. ‘‘This is a movie about how art saves the soul,’’ she says.

It’s enough of a fairy tale to allow for various projections – like when sportswriter Bill Simmons used the film to explain the cursed Boston Red Sox. ‘‘We’re all stuck, in some measure – some by choices we make, some by life circumstance, some by tragedy,’’ Robbins says. The film asks: ‘‘What does it actually mean to be free – and what is that life fully realised?’’

Darabont once heard from a fan who dropped out of college, ballooned to nearly 160kg and considered suicide, but the movie made him turn his life around. Another who had motor neurone disease wrote a Newsweek essay about how his body was his Shawshank and the movie motivated him to find ways to tunnel out. Nelson Mandela once told Robbins that the film’s depiction of incarceration hit home, as did its message that hope can heal.

Shawshank inspires faith in the survival of many good things: knowledge, art, justice. It wants us to believe that a best friend is forever. That walls cannot confine you and do not define you.

Saying Shawshank is my favourite movie once felt like revealing an offbeat secret and it felt like a cliche. But true Shankheads fully embrace their devotion to a thing that is great – and good.

Before the screening, as Darabont chats outside the theatre, a bystander discovers the director’s identity and says he heard that Shawshank was the best movie in history.

‘‘Aww, that’s sweet,’’ Darabont responds. ‘‘I’m not sure I believe that. But I’ll take the compliment.’’