MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Doctor Sleep’ Stumbles, Fails as Both Sequel and Adaptation

Did someone say, “Redrum?” Someone said, “Redrum, redrum.”

In an alternate universe, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 horror novel, The Shining, wouldn’t exist. King, notoriously unhappy with Kubrick’s free-associative adaptation of one of his most personal novels, would be more than content if we did. Thankfully, we don’t live in that alternate universe. King’s early novel of abuse, trauma, and the supernatural endures as one of his most well-rounded, well-plotted works of contemporary fiction. Influenced more by European art cinema than horror tropes, Kubrick’s idiosyncratic adaptation both elevated and redefined a genre too often dismissed for its perceived reliance on crude shocks, jump scares, and gory violence. (Much to his displeasure, if not surprise, Kubrick’s adaptation inadvertently launched a thousand fan theories of varying, usually dubious merit.) That challenge left writer-director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Gerard’s Game, Hush, Oculus) in a daunting, if not impossible, position: Making a film simultaneously faithful to both Kubrick’s masterpiece and King’s belated 2013 follow-up, Doctor Sleep. Spoiler alert: Flanagan’s hubris-flavored, borderline delusional self-confidence to craft a film reconciling two contrasting, conflicting, contradictory visions proved to be beyond his abilities.

Doctor Sleep opens with a traumatized, haunted Danny Torrance and his mother, Wendy (Alex Essoe), exchanging the sub-zero, frigid environs of the ghost-infested Overlook Hotel for the heat and humidity of Florida. From there, Doctor Sleep splits, diverges, and converges between several different subplots and characters, jumping between Danny as a young boy, an adult (played by Ewan McGregor), a nomadic band of near-immortal serial killers led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), and Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), a preternaturally precocious teen gifted/cursed with the “shining,” a vaguely defined set of superpowers (e.g., telepathy, telekinesis, astral projection, ghost whispering, etc.). Rose the Hat’s cult-like group, the True Knot, subsist on children who possess “steam” (“shining” by another name). (The younger the shiner, the purer and more potent the steam, apparently).