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Nov 8, 2019 · Mike Flanagan’s “Doctor Sleep” connects the visions of Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick with his own style, made most popular in Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House.” It is an often effective blend of the three as it’s forced to pay more homage to Kubrick’s vision than King was in his book, which served purely as a sequel to a ...
Nov 3, 2019 · Doctor Sleep review – The Shining sequel has its own spooky sparkle | Horror films | The Guardian. Rebecca Ferguson as the ‘seductive, fearsome’ Rose the Hat in Doctor Sleep. Photograph...
- Don’t Overlook this Shining sequel.
- Doctor Sleep vs. The Shining: Side-By-Side Comparison
- Verdict
By Tom Jorgensen
Updated: Dec 17, 2020 10:35 pm
Posted: Oct 30, 2019 4:00 pm
The tragedy of the Torrance family is one of the most beloved horror stories ever told. The Shining is one of Stephen King’s biggest hits and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation has beguiled viewers for decades. But these two versions of the story have always been seen as very different sides of the same coin, as Kubrick’s film deviates majorly from King’s novel. That’s what made the prospect of adapting Doctor Sleep, King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining, so tricky - how do you stay true to one without betraying the other? It turns out, you get Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Ouija: Origin of Evil), a modern master of ghost stories; combined with a great cast, and a whole heap of cool psychic set-pieces, and it just works. Most of Doctor Sleep delights with the new material it brings to this chapter of Torrance family history - its only real moments of weakness come when overindulging in Kubrick’s vision of the story.
After a prologue dealing with the direct aftermath of The Shining, Doctor Sleep picks up with an adult Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor), an alcoholic drifter who uses booze to dull both his horrific memories and his powers. We see flashes of his life back when he was drinking, but the story quickly moves on to follow a years-sober Dan, using his shine in a limited way to help hospice patients pass on peacefully to the after-life. Early on in his journey to sobriety, Dan becomes aware of Abra Stone (Kyleigh Curran), a young girl who shines even more powerfully than him. Dan’s not the only one to notice this talent, though: The True Knot, a cult of quasi-immortal hunters that feed on people who shine, pick up on Abra’s power as well. The story, which spans decades and focuses on multiple characters, is a total departure from The Shining’s claustrophobic setting. That narrative breathing room gives Doctor Sleep a lot of opportunities to do its own thing and when it’s forging its own path, the movie rarely falters.
Doctor Sleep is one of the scariest Stephen King adaptations in years, thanks in large part to the formidable True Knot. In contrast to The Shining’s villain, which despite working through Jack was really the Overlook Hotel itself, Doctor Sleep benefits and stands apart by having physical antagonists with more concrete goals and methods for Dan and Abra to battle. And it is clear that they will do anything to win, brutally murdering children in the film’s most hard-to-watch scenes. One of these minor characters is actually played by a surprisingly high-profile child actor, his presence distracting until he’s tasked with believably screaming his way through a very R-rated death.
Writer/director Mike Flanagan’s eye for bringing metaphysicality to life on film has long been one of his greatest assets and it serves him well again here. Doctor Sleep doesn’t quite approach the singular sense of unreality in Kubrick’s film, but Flanagan’s methods of visually communicating what the Shining is and how it can work through its various hosts provide a source of constant unease and danger. The twists and turns Flanagan mines out of that power both deepen our understanding of what it means to shine and keep the film interesting throughout its considerable 2 hours and 33 minutes.
Through its lofty scenes of psychic warfare and intense character beats, Doctor Sleep is anchored by a wealth of strong performances. Ewan McGregor’s Dan Torrance is a heartbreakingly damaged man, torn between helping Abra fight the True Knot and keeping the ghosts of his past locked away. The weight of Dan’s trauma is especially easy to sympathize with here because we know exactly how horrific those ghosts are. Kyliegh Curran holds her own as gifted teen Abra, at her most effective in her confrontations with the True Knot, when she’s tasked with flipping between scared kid and supernatural warrior in the blink of a creepy, milky eye. The standout of the cast is Rebecca Ferguson’s villain, Rose the Hat. As the leader of the True Knot, Ferguson imbues Rose with a malice and ferocity that make her a terrifying foe. In her best moments, Ferguson rivals the unhinged madness Jack Nicholson brought to Jack Torrance.
Ewan McGregor explains how Jack Torrance haunts Danny in Doctor Sleep:
It’s when Doctor Sleep drifts away from evocation to straight-up recreation that Flanagan starts to overplay his hand. To be clear, not all of Doctor Sleep’s Shining love goes amiss. Scenes in which shot composition, edits, and sound cues are reused feel like rewarding nods to Kubrick’s Shining. Even Carl Lumbly’s brief appearance as Dick Hallorann ends up being effective, with Lumbly giving us just enough Scatman Crothers to make this feel like the kindly Hallorann we know without feeling like a full-on impersonation. The same can’t be said about Alex Essoe’s Wendy Torrance. Essoe doesn’t quite pull off the physical or vocal qualities of Shelley Duvall’s iconic performance, so visions of her ordeal at the Overlook, itself staggeringly recreated, have a bizarre quality of documentary re-enactment.
When it’s focusing on the new things it brings to the table, Doctor Sleep is consistently terrifying, visually impressive, and soulful in equal measure. Though it may get a little heavy-handed and tonally confused in its reverence for Stanley Kubrick’s Shining in the homestretch, the vast majority of the film succeeds in using the Torrance family’s...
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Oct 30, 2019 · Oct 30, 2019 9:00am PT. Film Review: ‘Doctor Sleep’. Stephen King's 2013 sequel to 'The Shining' gets turned into a film that's long and prosaic but also creepy and scary: a tale of...
Doctor Sleep is a dense dance of nostalgic supernatural horror mixed with a deep psychological examination of how we can rise from the sins of the past. Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Apr...
Nov 8, 2019 · With Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis. Years following the events of The Shining (1980), a now-adult Dan Torrance must protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with powers to remain immortal.
Doctor Sleep is a 2019 American supernatural horror film edited, written and directed by Mike Flanagan. It is an adaptation of the 2013 novel of the same name by Stephen King and sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining.
