On the definitive list of movies that absolutely do not need a sequel, surely Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining ranks somewhere near the top. That film’s unerring sense of bone-deep terror is both resolute and hypnotically all-encompassing in a way that can largely be attributed to the fervent meticulousness of its maker. The soul-shattering ambiguity of The Shining’s climax suggests, teasingly, that it may in fact be one of Kubrick’s most personal statements disguised as a thriller of hermetic, debilitating isolation.
Either way, no one was crying out for a Shining 2.0 in 2019, but thankfully, Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep isn’t that by a long shot. The Shining is, among other things, informed by the menacing irrationality of unfettered dream logic; as such, it transcends jump-scare gimmickry in favor of deep currents of terrifying subjectivity that slither into the subconscious corners of the viewer's mind and find a home there.
'Doctor Sleep' Is a Distant Cry From 'The Shining'
If The Shining is the best kind of bad dream, then Doctor Sleep, at least, by contrast, represents a kind of spooky, old-school carnival ride experience, albeit one that is riddled with Flanagan’s preferred themes of adult trauma, addiction, and childhood innocence destroyed. The film is, in many ways, a distant cry from the black-hearted majesty of Kubrick’s 1980 milestone – but then again, one could very well make the argument that, flaws and all, Doctor Sleep is its own experience: shaggy, credibly ambitious, often genuinely horrific, and, in its way, a genuinely worthy sequel to one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
Flanagan Puts His Own Spin on Stephen King
Doctor Sleep is a film whose excesses sometimes get the best of it: Flanagan’s screenplay is practically bursting at the seams with wild ideas, and oftentimes, the Midnight Mass creator bites off more than he can chew. That said, Flanagan seems to understand that the best way to pay homage to The Shining is not to attempt to imitate what Kubrick did but to process, distill, and clarify the original film’s themes of alienation and madness into a bewitching and entirely original brew.
It doesn’t hurt that, with Doctor Sleep, Flanagan once again showcases an incredibly messed-up, macabre imagination behind the camera. Along with his tendency towards humanistic horror, Flanagan undeniably possesses a sadistic streak, and Doctor Sleep is often unrelenting in its viciousness in a way that The Shining (a far more restrained work, on the whole) only hints at. Really, Flanagan barely even tries to channel the languorous, trancelike passages of malevolent energy that course through The Shining; if anything, his update often plays like a grimier, R-rated spin on a Neil Gaiman fantasy novel, with its folkloric flourishes, gallows humor, and open embrace of magical realism.
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In a way, Doctor Sleep has the opposite problem as certain other popular cinematic adaptations of the work of Stephen King have, such as 2017's It and 2019’s Pet Sematary. These aforementioned movies both know and proudly own the idea that they are ridiculous pieces of multiplex entertainment, however capably put together their narrative parts may be. Doctor Sleep, on the other hand, is an impressively large-scale, philosophically elaborate, and, at times, unwieldy piece of horror fiction, one that straddles genres and tones and embraces a full-tilt, adults-only approach, even when the screenplay’s tone and execution seem inexplicably pitched towards the sensibilities of more juvenile viewers.
King, of course, was famously critical of Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, and one can assume, based on Flanagan films like Gerald’s Game (a King adaptation) and Oculus (not based on anything written by King, but certainly influenced by his spirit), that the director enjoys a presumably chummier relationship with the author of spine-tingling literary landmarks like Cujo and Carrie. Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep – which is, yes, an adaptation of a King-penned Shining sequel that was published in 2013 – ends up erring closer to the world that will be familiar to King readers, augmenting the argument that this Doctor Sleep works as a sequel to The Shining primarily because it resists fan service, right up until its somewhat underwhelming climax (which we’ll get to in a bit).
What Is 'Doctor Sleep' About?
Doctor Sleep, among other things, answers the question of what happened to Danny Torrance, the poor, tricycle-riding youngster whose maniacal wordsmith dad nearly chopped him to pieces with an axe once upon a time. When we catch up with him, Danny has grown into a depressed adult degenerate prone to trouble, one who is plagued by terrible dreams and played by a gravely arresting Ewan McGregor. Now going by “Dan,” McGregor’s tortured, bleary-eyed mess of a protagonist is still living with the unprocessed trauma of what took place all those years ago at the Overlook Hotel, and the nighttime visions he finds himself haunted by are filled with the cries of the dead. Doctor Sleep’s plot kicks into gear when Dan meets a child, Abra (a terrific Kyliegh Curran), who is gifted with her own psychic ability. Flanagan's depiction of these two lost souls, bonded by a strange and unexplainable ability to communicate telekinetically, is as touching as anything he's ever had a hand in directing.
There is also, of course, the matter of a nefarious, roving, seemingly vampiric cult of child-murderers who call themselves The True Knot. The True Knot is led by Rose the Hat, a kind of poisonously psychopathic, soft-voiced earth mama played with malicious gusto by the movie’s secret weapon, Rebecca Ferguson. The True Knot prey on the young and helpless – those who possess a “shine,” as Danny does – and what they do to a terrified, baseball-loving tyke played by Jacob Tremblay is so disturbing that it brings the movie into another far more atrocious realm of thematic barbarity.
'Doctor Sleep' Isn't Afraid to Get Messy
The first hour and a half of Doctor Sleep crackles with ripe tension – ironically, it’s when Danny and Abra end up at the Overlook Hotel that the film begins to feel like it’s spinning in place. There is a gloomy, at times indistinct sheen to the patina of Flanagan’s admittedly brilliant re-creation of the Overlook that is redolent of David Fincher’s early work, even if it is (knowingly) a far cry from the pristine, nearly antiseptic perfectionism of Kubrick's aesthetic. The Shining, of course, is a coiled, mannered, almost unimaginably controlled film. Doctor Sleep, by contrast, isn’t afraid to be big and messy and even unfashionably earnest at times.
In the end, it feels safe to assume that Flanagan – who is, among other things, a true scholar of and advocate for horror in its purest form – knows that he can’t top a film considered by many to be one of the most persuasive works of terror in the American movie pantheon. To his credit, he doesn’t even try. Doctor Sleep is its own sick, arresting spectacle: not a mindless simulacrum of The Shining, but an ode to its grim power.
