Mark Reviews Movies: DOCTOR SLEEP

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2019

When it was announced that Stephen King was going to release a sequel to his 1977 novel The Shining almost 40 years after the original book, one couldn't help but be more than a bit skeptical. What more could be told of the story of an alcoholic who nearly murders his family while serving as the caretaker of a haunted hotel (especially considering what happened to the hotel in the novel)?

The book, called Doctor Sleep, was a success, because it wasn't really a sequel to the preceding novel. It followed a main character from that book, yes, as he dealt with the lifelong fallout of the trauma of what occurred, and stuck with one of the core ideas. From that, though, King uncovered even more twisted potential in the notion that there are people with psychic abilities, uniquely attuned to others and those who have crossed over to the other side—for good and for evil.

Now, we get the film adaptation of the sequel, which comes with perhaps even more skepticism than King's novel faced. After all, writer/director Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep isn't just an adaptation of the book. It's also a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which—despite the disapproval of the author of the source material—is one of the great horror films. King ignored Kubrick's changes to the original story for his book, and some of them are considerable. Flanagan, then, has a series of unenviable tasks facing him with this film.

First, he has to follow up the work of a master filmmaker, whose shadow is going to loom over this film—whether Flanagan wants it to or not. Second, he has to reconcile the differences between King, who clearly—based on the sequel novel alone—wanted nothing to do with the film adaptation, and Kubrick, whose film has almost certainly surpassed the novel in terms of cultural relevancy in the ensuing decades. Third, he has to actually tell this particular story with all of this pressure and all of these conflicting notions of what The Shining actually constitutes, means, and, well, is. Ask any five people, and you'll probably get five very different answers (If any of them have read the book and seen the film, you could probably count on two sets of answers).

To make a long story short, Flanagan has succeeded for the most part. He sticks to King's novel for the isolated tale of Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor), who undergoes a series of life-changing events and decisions over the course of the first act. After containing the spirits of the Overlook Hotel, which have followed him and his mother to sunny Florida, Danny has a different kind of ghost with which to contend. Like his father, he becomes an alcoholic. Unlike the dad whom he only really knew as a violent drunk, Danny finds a quiet town to start a new life and get sober. In the ensuing years, he uses his gift to ease the passing of people in hospice care.

In the backdrop, there are also the horrors of the members of a murderous cult, wandering the United States in search of their food—namely, the essence of any child who possesses psychic abilities. After torturing and killing assorted children over the years, the group, led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), sets its sights on Abra (Kyliegh Curran), a young girl who "shines" even more brightly than Danny. The girl and the man have struck up a friendly psychic communication for about eight years, and now, Danny has to decide whether to confront the evils of his gift or to continue hiding.

Flanagan tells this story while also—in terms of pacing, transitions, shot compositions, and camera movement—sticking closely to Kubrick's filmmaking in the first film. It's not Kubrick. That's for sure, but Flanagan convinces us well enough. He can re-create whole shots from the 1980 film, and they fit right into the new material (Some likely will believe that the filmmaker has simply taken footage from the first film and inserted into this one, which is saying something, and the new actors look enough like the original cast—especially from behind or from a certain angle—to complete the illusion).

The story itself is both frightening, especially when it comes to the cult, and ridiculous, because those psychic abilities—from impacting the physical world to allowing a character entrance into another's mind—are portrayed quite literally here. Flanagan, in addition to grounding this story in the repression of trauma, at least has the daring to go literal—and in big, presentational ways.

Rose's trek into Abra's mind, for example, has her hovering above the world, with a canvass of stars behind her, before floating into the girl's bedroom. The cult's ritualistic barbarity is horrific, and their feeding on the screaming mist of the souls of children is haunting (Their exits from the physical world, losing layers of anatomy in howling pain, are gruesomely satisfying).

During the third act of Doctor Sleep, in which the present and the past meet in that damned hotel amidst the Colorado mountains, Flanagan pulls off the film's most impressive trick: embracing nostalgia in such a way that it exclusively informs this new tale (A conversation between Danny and the hotel's bartender, who has the same name and a new but familiar face, is chilling and heartbreaking, because of what it means for these two men, as well as their shared and individual histories). It never comes across as cheap pandering. If Flanagan can meet all of the inherent challenges of making this film, he's definitely not going to muck it up when it really counts.

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