Doctor Sleep: Prosaic callback to The Shining might have worked better without all that baggage

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C-plus

Any argument that mainstream moviemaking has fundamentally changed should include the fact that a sequel to The Shining has come out that is about good guys with super powers repelling an attack by bad guys with super powers.

This may seem a facile dismissal of Doctor Sleep, a Stephen King adaptation that is doomed to be compared with the moody masterpiece that was Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic. In some reality where it came without baggage – and where it didn’t have to be a bloated two-and-a-half hours to accommodate its relationship to a classic – Doctor Sleep could stand on its own as a decently stylish popcorn thriller.

Ewan McGregor is the grownup Danny Torrence in The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep

But the makers of Doctor Sleep, including writer/director Mike Flanagan, made their own bed. Whereas King’s source novel was pointedly a sequel to the book and not the movie (which King famously never liked), the movie Doctor Sleep has been promoted as a sequel to both.

The result is a stylistic Frankenstein’s monster. Doctor Sleep’s sore-thumb callbacks to Kubrick’s movie are jarring, and require an entire last act at the infamous, snowy Overlook Hotel in Colorado that the movie would have been better off without.

Moreover, they reveal a chasm between Kubrick’s approach and explain-it-all contemporary movie-making. The Shining followed the notion that the unknown is scarier than the known. Even at the end of the movie, we were never sure exactly what malevolent force was exerting itself over the Torrance family – only that it somehow made the dad descend into madness (something Jack Nicholson provided to a wild-eyed degree that would impact pop culture for a generation). 

By contrast, Doctor Sleep starts explaining itself pretty much from the starting blocks. Young Danny (played in flashbacks by Roger Dale Floyd) has grown into a weary, alcoholic drifter, played by Ewan McGregor. 

The adult Dan is still visited by the ghost of Dick Halloran (Carl Lumbly), the cook who informed him of his “shining” abilities before being killed (said abilities at the time pretty much consisted of being able to talk to Halloran with his mind, and seeing things other people couldn’t see). 

Lumbly, who delivers a pretty good impression of the late Scatman Crothers, is one of a handful of actors called upon to evoke the original cast. Alex Essoe, as Dan’s mom Wendy, nails Shelly Duvall’s mannerisms, while Henry Thomas (yes, the kid from ET) does a Nicholson impression that’s better than most comics I’ve seen.

In any case, Halloran’s job seems to be to act as a Greek chorus, directly explaining to Dan things about his powers and how to live his life, and – most importantly to the story – alerting him to a little girl with a powerful “shine” whose life is in danger.

Cue the bad guys. Rose (Rebecca Ferguson) is the leader of the True Knot, a caravan of soul-sucking vampires who seek out children with “shine,” kill them and inhale their life force to prolong their own lives (occasionally “turning” one of them instead, a direct vampire reference). In the most thankless task of his young career, Canadian kid Jacob Tremblay must act out being tortured to death in the movie’s most sickening scene.

With her Jack White hat and hippie accoutrements, Rose is outwardly friendly, and profoundly evil. She’s also possessed of the apex of “shine” powers, including astral-projecting around the planet and being able to enter people’s minds.

But hey, so does Abra (Kyliegh Curran), the aforementioned 13-year-old girl, whose powers may be even greater than Rose’s, and who is therefore marked for death with extreme prejudice.

All of this takes a very long time, considering you’re simply assembling a group of evildoers and a trio of good-hearted defenders to take them on (Dan, Abra and Billy, Dan’s friend from AA, played by Cliff Curtis).

The problem with explaining it all as we go along is that, for example, we are shown over and over a significant corner of someone’s brain that any half-wit could predict would be key to the ending. 

Doctor Sleep. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan. Starring Ewan McGregor, Kyliegh Curran and Rebecca Ferguson. Opens wide, Friday, November 8.