Like many Stephen King stories, Doctor Sleep, the author’s belated sequel to his 1977 classic The Shining, isn’t so much a work of straight horror as it is an epic fantasy suffused with elements of the horrific. In a narrative framework familiar from novels like It and The Stand, an evil, ethereal force can only be stopped by a surrogate family who can marshal those same forces for good, after a difficult journey and an episodic vanquishing of obstacles that hones their skills and resolve. As styled by King, such stories may on occasion provoke terror, but redemption and retributive justice are their true structuring emotions.
That writer-director Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Doctor Sleep is also a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—notoriously despised by King, principally for its un-redemptive finale—makes for an awkward combination. Flanagan’s film maintains King’s penchant for epic structure while repeatedly evoking Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror, from multiple callbacks to the earlier film’s iconic helicopter shot following a car headed toward doom, to appropriations of its methodically slow lap dissolves, to a brief and throwaway recapitulation of the original’s subtly unnerving job-interview scene, to the inevitable return to the Overlook Hotel. It’s probably to Doctor Sleep’s credit that it departs from its four-decade-old precedent in narrative and tone, but the new film’s repeated, overt references to a very different film give it a wobbly feeling, as if it’s teetering back and forth between King’s vision and Kubrick’s.
In the wake of the supernatural events of The Shining, Danny Torrence (Ewan McGregor) suffered through decades of trauma and hard living, pursued by the undead guests of the Overlook Hotel who’ve taken up residence in his psyche. Because of Danny’s telepathic gift (the titular “Shining”), the ghosts in his mind don’t manifest themselves physically, but they’re something more than mere memories, presenting both emotional and bodily danger. Luckily, Danny’s fellow “shiner,” the late Dick Halloran (Carl Lumbly), has also stuck around in Danny’s head, appearing at opportune times to advise him on how best to use the shining—not unlike a well-known sci-fi surrogate father McGregor himself has played.
Danny has his drinking in check and his multiple demons more or less battened up in metaphorical mind-boxes. Dick teaches him to build in his head, and is living a quiet and solitary life in rural New Hampshire when a powerful teenaged telepath named Abra (Kyliegh Curran) makes contact via the blackboard painted on Danny’s attic-apartment wall. The unlikely friends exchange messages with chalk on the wall for eight years, until the night Abra psychically witnesses what could be described as a transient, bohemian clan of psychic vampires torture and murder Billy (Jacob Tremblay), an Iowan child who also “shines.” Rose (Rebecca Ferguson), leader of the clan and a powerful telepath herself, catches the powerful Abra spying on them, and the group intends to make her their next victim.
While Doctor Sleep’s first act uses the escalation and release of tension to explore the horror of Danny’s repressed trauma, much of the film’s remainder is based not around the dread that there may be, say, a ghoul around the corner or a corpse behind the closed bathroom door, but around anticipation that the child murderers will get their comeuppance. While Flanagan finds ways to thrillingly convey, for example, the long-distance psychic battle between Rose and Abra, his continued adherence to the motifs of the Kubrick film make for a lack of cohesion between the film’s horror elements and its adventure ones.
The film’s simplified moral clarity is what largely makes it odd bedfellows with Kubrick’s The Shining. As the members of Rose’s clan are gradually dispatched, Abra is always on hand to proclaim, with cold moral righteousness, “You deserve this,” a needling and gratuitous reassurance to the audience that we have permission to enjoy their painful, writhing deaths. While King’s stories often concern themselves with such questions of just deserts, Kubrick’s The Shining doesn’t, which is part of why Flanagan’s partially digital rebuild of the earlier film’s Overlook Hotel set feels like it diminishes it of its abject horror.
The somewhat undermotivated return to Danny’s ur-space of anguish resembles a similar scene in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One far more than it should: Doctor Sleep’s final act is little more than a denuded pastiche of Kubrick’s film, repurposing its haunting visuals (including specific camera movements) and refiguring the spirits that haunt the Overlook as tools exploited by our heroes. Rose, encountering the hallway filling with blood, shrugs her shoulders and moves on—which may also be your response the umpteenth time you see the rotting, undead woman from Room 237 who haunts every bath in the film. Given the difference in the respective stories’ tone and themes, Flanagan’s film would probably have been served by a more decisive departure from its predecessor. Like a traumatized psyche, it remains uncomfortably stuck in the past, replaying familiar events in an effort to empty them of terror.
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