Review: Doctor Sleep

King vs Kubrick …

Danny was haunted by a ghost obsessed with 1970s British racehorses …

Director: Mike Flanagan

Writer(s): Mike Flanagan, Stephen King (novel)

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis, Emily Alyn Lind, Zahn McClarnon, Alex Essoe, Roger Dale Floyd, Jacob Tremblay, Bruce Greenwood, Carel Struycken

Synopsis

Nearly forty years after his father attempted to murder him and his mother at the Overlook Hotel, Danny Torrance (Ewen McGregor) is a recovering alcoholic, working as an orderly at care home for the elderly, where he uses his ‘shining’ powers to calm patients, before they pass away peacefully.

However, when Danny becomes aware of a young girl, Abra (Kyliegh Curran) with a powerful ‘shine’, he finds himself drawn back into the world of the supernatural, because a group of drifters lead by ‘Rose The Hat’, (Rebecca Ferguson), are hunting down children with the shining, because draining their essence allows these drifters to unnaturally extend their lives …

Main review

For many years, Stephen King had a very difficult relationship with Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. Deviating from the novel in many ways, King felt that the film wasn’t a true representation of his work. Yet, undeniably, Kubrick’s film is a classic, even if it’s more of a Kubrick film, than a Stephen King adaptation.

As the years have gone by, King has come to admit that Kubrick’s film is a masterpiece of horror cinema, even if it’s not really representative of his work. So when King chose to write a sequel novel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, he simply used his own novel of The Shining as the source text. However, anyone choosing to adapt Doctor Sleep for cinema would then be met with a dilemma; for most people, particularly those who are cine-literate, Kubrick’s version of The Shining is better known than the novel.

Mike Flanagan had the daunting task of balancing the tone of Kubrick’s film with telling a new story, steeped in Stephen King weirdness. It’s a wobbly tightrope, but for the most part Flanagan keeps his balance. Flanagan has become a bit of a horror auteur himself, so following on from Kubrick actually seems like a natural fit for the writer-director.

Doctor Sleep certainly benefits from Flanagan’s slow burning approach to horror, tinged with some innate weirdness. The way ‘shining’ is sometimes demonstrated can slingshot between simple and incredibly trippy. Further to this, Ewan McGregor is smart casting as a middle aged Danny Torrance. He really sells Danny’s inner battle with his alcoholism (and his need to understand his father), while fearing that he might to turn into his father, if he doesn’t stay sober.

Yet, just like Danny struggling to deal with his father’s legacy, Doctor Sleep does struggle with Kubrick’s legacy. There is a natural (and reasonably justified) urge to simply fall into nostalgia about Kubrick’s horror classic. Given where Doctor Sleep‘s narrative leads, this is difficult to avoid, but it does feel, a lot of the time, like The Shining overshadows Doctor Sleep. The most interesting scenes in Doctor Sleep are ones that don’t reference The Shining at all, and when Doctor Sleep does fall back into nostalgia, it feels like the film loses focus.

The reality is that Doctor Sleep can’t completely overcome of the legacy of Kubrick’s masterpiece, so it embraces it as much as it can instead. As such, just like The Shining, Doctor Sleep ends up being slow paced and a bit overlong, but this is an ongoing issue with adapting King novels.

When the film does chose to be nostalgic, its recreations are at least technically impressive; whether it’s Flanagan matching shots from The Shining, or the reconstruction of the Overlook Hotel, using a combination of real sets and Kubrick’s original footage, digitally weaved in. In the end, Doctor Sleep is a film torn by its parent, as much as Danny is about Jack. However, at least the film holds its own as a decent horror-thriller, even though it was never going to surpass the source material that it revers so much.

Pros

• Mike Flanagan finds a nice balance between the tone of Kubrick’s The Shining and keeping to the spirit of King’s Doctor Sleep novel.
• The way that the film depicts the use of ‘shining’ powers is very trippy.
• Ewan McGregor is perfectly cast as a middle age Danny Torrance, dealing with the legacy of his father’s alcoholism, as much as the film deals with Kubrick’s legacy of The Shining.
• The return to the Overlook Hotel is a masterful combination of editing and set design.

Cons

• At 152 minutes long, the film feels very baggy.
• The shadow of The Shining is long and looming, sometimes to the film’s detriment.
• The film gets lost in nostalgia in the third act.

In a nutshell …

Mike Flanagan has become a bit of a horror genre specialist, and he’s certainly up to the challenge of balancing King’s narrative, against the legacy of Kubrick’s seminal work. The film is creepy and atmospheric, but it’s also overlong and loses itself a bit in nostalgia for Kubrick’s classic. Certainly one of the better Stephen King adaptations out there though.