Doctor Sleep directed by Mike Flanagan. Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.
Doctor Sleep, directed by Mike Flanagan (fast establishing himself with The Haunting of Hill House and other films as a unique and prolific voice in the horror\suspense\supernatural genre), is a direct sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic The Shining. So naturally, I found myself wondering if Jack Nicholson would be making an appearance in Doctor Sleep. Well… Kind of. But we’ll get to that in a second.
The most frequent comment made about this film is that it “serves two masters” or some variation therefrom. Some think it doesn’t serve either one very well, or should have focused on one rather than splitting its attention. You see The Shining, the novel, is a Stephen King Classic. The Shining, the movie, is also a classic. But the movie was quite different from the book and Stephen King famously did not like what Kubrick did with the character of Jack Torrance (which is balderdash is my opinion). A few years ago King wrote a sequel, Doctor Sleep, which no one was really clamoring for but we have it all the same. So Flanagan, in adapting King’s sequel had to navigate between quite different but equally acclaimed and beloved source material. Did he succeed?
I liked Doctor Sleep. It takes up the story of Danny Torrance, dealing with the trauma of his dad going berserk and a bunch of ghosts trying to kill him as a child. It expands the world of the original Shining in fun, clever and interesting ways adding a whole new class of telepathic villains and heroes. It has a rather disturbing fixation on child murder that is worthy of Vince Gilligan. I think Doctor Sleep splits the difference between its two “masters” with admirable dexterity, never spoon-feeding the audience and assuming a certain level of familiarity and affection for Kubrick’s Shining, while pushing out the frontiers of the story and giving Danny a more developed character arc.
Not only that, but Doctor Sleep’s visual style is really great. Moody, atmospheric - it at times directly quotes Kubrick, lifting scenes from the original. But it also has a visual style and voice all its own, and one that is pretty recognizable as Mike Flanagan’s. Telekinesis, something inherently unobservable, is depicted in a variety of inventive ways. The film has a certain supernatural intimacy in its visual style, very much like The Haunting of Hill House. This contrasts of course with Kubrick’s ice old vision of entropic terror, and it allows Doctor Sleep to chart its own course with confidence.
Yet it’s not perfect, of course. While the world-building is pretty great, and the dialogue is excellent, the plot is a bit rote and predictable pitting the bad guys against the good guys in a bit of push-pull narrative hubglubbery where you can see most every beat coming from a mile away. And then, of course, no matter what Doctor Sleep can’t really escape the ghost of Kubrick’s Shining. Flanagan chose to re-cast Scatman Crothers and Shelley Duvall. I don’t love it, but understandable I suppose. He also chose to recast Jack Nicholson, for a very important father-son character moment, and this sticks out like a sore thumb.
The final act features a very long, very slow walk through every iconic part of the Overlook Hotel, including a warped Field of Dreams-style father-son reunion via the astral plane. This felt too perfunctory, over long and unnecessary. The film is a bit long anyway and probably would have benefited from some trimming, but then for it all to culminate in a bargain bin Jack Nicholson impression was so very disappointing. I was pretty much with Doctor Sleep up until the ending, and then it kind of deflated on me like a souffle. No surprise there though. Mike Flanagan is immensely talented - but endings are hard, and his record there is spotty at best.
