He meets another psychic, a teenage girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran), on the astral plane. Flanagan doesn’t give this material short shrift: McGregor is convincing as a tortured soul dragging himself toward stability, a crucial arc for King (whose Shining novel was far more about Jack’s struggles with addiction than Kubrick’s movie was).Īlongside that narrative of redemption, though, is an arcane and sometimes tedious attempt to delve deeper into the extrasensory “shining” power Danny was born with. Now all grown up, Danny is an alcoholic, drinking to ward off the demons of his past eventually he finds a stable job as an orderly at a hospice and works on conquering his problems through a 12-step program. But it never quite figures out how to bring the two styles together.ĭoctor Sleep follows Danny Torrance (played by Ewan McGregor), best remembered as the psychic little boy of The Shining who was tormented by the Overlook Hotel’s visions of death and eventually chased around the building by his mad father, Jack. Over its 151-minute running time, Doctor Sleep floats between the bleak and mournful themes of King’s writing and the chilling, inimitable dread of Kubrick’s filmmaking. Flanagan actually succeeds as well as he can on both fronts. It’s an ambitious undertaking, given both the strangeness of King’s original book and the impossibility of following up one of Kubrick’s most legendary films.
On the other, it’s a loving homage to Kubrick’s film, one that painstakingly re-creates the look and feel of its most famous location, the haunted Overlook Hotel.
On one hand, Doctor Sleep is a long, measured, and fairly faithful adaptation of King’s work. In taking on this follow-up, Flanagan has attempted to combine King’s world-building and Kubrick’s departures from it. King’s Doctor Sleep pointedly avoided any reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, an adaptation that the author has frequently decried, despite its lofty status in the horror-movie canon. Let me try to sum up Doctor Sleep as simply and sanely as possible: The film, written and directed by the emerging horror maestro Mike Flanagan, is based on Stephen King’s 2013 novel, which is itself a sequel to King’s 1977 classic, The Shining.
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