Directed by Mike Flanagan, Doctor Sleep picks up with Danny Torrance, days after the events of The Shining. He is not talking to his mother because he is still being terrorised by the ghouls that lived in the Overlook Hotel. Dick Hallorann appears, and teaches Danny a method to “lock away” the entities that haunt him so he can move on with the rest of his life. Danny, as an adult, gets a job at a hospital and rents a small apartment with a huge chalkboard on the wall. He connects with a young girl telepathically, by writing notes back and forth on the chalkboard, and the two must come together when they discover a group of ‘shine-hunters’ hunting nearby. The group call themselves the True Knot, and they murder special kids for their shine, eating their ‘steam’ for longevity.
Oh, the weary unknown of a sequel that comes decades after the original. The Shining is an undeniable classic horror film, and it’s not often that I wonder what happened to Danny when he grew up to be Ewan McGregor. The cynic in me might see this as a cash-grab leaping off the legacy of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but since Stephen King wrote this sequel book, and his name is printed on the poster and in most titles for the movie, as Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, it may be something more. Stephen King famously hated the interpretation of Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and there are quite a few differences between the book and movie; I wondered which source material Doctor Sleep will mostly reference. Turns out the answer is both; Doctor Sleep keeps in line with the movie version of The Shining, but is that much of an original story that there’s only a few isolated moments when that matters.
I don’t mind the reuse of characters for different stories and that is basically want happens here. The opening of Doctor Sleep works as a nice prologue to The Shining, but until the ending, adult Danny is fairly separated from the events of the first instalment. Unfortunately for Doctor Sleep, simply recreating the events of The Shining isn’t impressive alone, since Steven Spielberg got there first with the epic scene from Ready Player One. The movie works to define exactly what the Overlook Hotel was in The Shining, as a dark energy that lured in and collected victims. I think The Shining gained strength by keeping the horror of the hotel vague, but Doctor Sleep defines the hotel to juxtaposition the new threat True Knot, as a group of quasi-humans with dark abilities that are able to collect their victims on the run. The film also expands on the capabilities of the ‘shine’, that Danny and the young girl Abra, possess. At one point, Danny was explaining his understanding of the shine to Abra and I thought he was only moments away from mentioning midichlorians, which probably would have brought down the whole franchise. Because the shine is similar to the force in Star Wars here, where some people are more sensitive to it than others, and some don’t even realise they have it. The shine is shown to also range in different forms here too, with the main baddie, Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), and her newest ‘apprentice’, Andi (Emily Alyn Lind) both possessing the power of suggestion; essentially the same ability of The Purple Man in TV’s Jessica Jones, a mutant supervillain of Marvel. I can see how people might get annoyed by the defining and expanding of mysteries brought about decades ago in The Shining, but I wasn’t turned away by it.
Our main protagonist is Abra, essentially, with Danny providing understanding and then, the final solution at the end. Abra is very powerful, giving the True Knot a very hard time. I think there’s a small issue with her being OP, since she’s always calm and never uncertain in any situation. It’s also peculiar to note that this is the second pre-existing property in as many weeks where the movie ends with a young girl taking over the mantle of a classic movie character; I’ll leave it to you to figure out the other. I found in both instances it made sense, but it’s interesting to point out how prevalent it is right now.
The plot within Doctor Sleep does not lend itself to be as scary as The Shining, which was a relief to me! (This is the first horror movie I’ve ever seen at the cinema, by myself: #becomingbrave). I think where the story goes wrong however, is by sometimes focusing on unimportant elements and using tired techniques. There’s a scene that sticks out to me for all the wrong reasons, where Danny and Billy are digging up the body of a victim of the True Knot, and Billy tells this story about how he used to go deer hunting but stopped because he once shot a deer and didn’t find the dead carcass for days. By the time he found the dead deer the smell was so bad he never hunted again, and he compares that smell to that of the dead kid. The story is supposed to be a revelation but I don’t know why he didn’t just say, “dead things smell really bad.” Since Billy isn’t around forever, I don’t know why we need to know his stories, especially when that scene could have gone in many other directions – Billy had just discovered Danny is telling the truth about his shine, and so he could have reacted to that. Or, since the pair just found a dead kid in the middle of nowhere; have them talk about what they should do with the body and which authorities they should tell.
The movie also doesn’t sufficiently explain how Danny became a drunk in the first place. The movie suggests that Danny did it to escape his shine, but that doesn’t correlate with the last time the movie showed us Danny, where as a boy, he learnt to cope with his shine by locking away dark forces inside trunks in his mind. Maybe the dark forces became too much for him, or maybe his alcoholism is simply genetic. It seems strange that we see Danny learning to use his gift as a boy, only to be numbing it out moments later, albeit twenty-or-so years later for him. Danny does say when his mother died, he saw black flies swarming her face, so maybe that was meant as last straw and he was done with his shine. Clearly Danny locked away all the evil of the Overlook Hotel except his father, and maybe he was ashamed that he couldn’t adequately lay his father to rest. Danny drinking was definitely used as thematic link between Danny and his father, but I think Danny could have just as easily been a tea-totaller because of his father, and still been tempted to drink by the ghost of Jack in the Overlook bar.
A couple of other bizarre choices that made me cringe – the hotel semi-taking over Danny’s body so he could limp through the hallways like a crazed maniac with an axe; homage to The Shining or not, it was just silly. I hated how Rose could see inside Danny’s mind to reveal his history with the hotel, only for one of his memories to be a re-enactment of Jack coming at his wife up the stairs – Danny wasn’t there for that moment in The Shining and certainly wouldn’t have remembered it from that iconic camera position if he was. It was foolish to have Abra fitted with a purple wig when she crumbled Rose’s hand in her mind; it was done to make Abra foreign, but it made no sense. And it gave me tingles when the movie replicated the overhead shot of the drive to the Overlook Hotel; it was just a pity that the movie had already used that technique three times by then.
I think Doctor Sleep justified its existence, ultimately telling a worthwhile story, even if we have to trudge through a bogged middle and poor creative choices to get there. I had the thought while watching, that maybe the movie might have worked better as chapters, where we focus solely on Danny for the first third, setup Abra and Rose in the belly, and have them all come together at the end. The movie puts a lot of effort into relaying the time and place with every shift from character to character, and it too much to track. I can see a desire to make this movie just to get to the crescendo, where all the iconic ghouls from the past attack at once, and run amok again around the Overlook Hotel. At times Doctor Sleep is like trudging through the snow 😉, but I’ve liked it more and more, the more I’ve thought about it.
3.0.
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