Doctor Sleep ** (2019 Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Carel Struycken) – Movie Review

Three decades on from the story in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic The Shining, the kid Danny Torrance is grown up, a troubled alcoholic drifter, now played by Ewan McGregor, who gets a job at a New Hampshire geriatric home, where he helps old folk into the next life with the help of his shining power and a clever white cat. He is Doctor Sleep.

Danny / Doctor Sleep meets Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), a 13-year-old girl with similar shining powers who wants to put the bad guys out of action, and finds himself reluctantly having to try to protect her from cult leader Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson)’s The True Knot, a murderous gang of near-immortals who prey on children with shining powers to live off their steam.

Stephen King’s wild and wayward plot for The Shining sequel is hard to corral and control for the movies. Its fantasy horror story doesn’t make any real sense, or even unreal sense. It has no logic, not even of its own. So it is easy to find yourself fighting the film.

Is it any good? Well, yes and no. Yes, it is interesting, intriguing and sort of involving, and keeps you awake trying to fathom out what the heck it’s supposed to mean. But, no, it is too long (at 151 minutes), too slow, too arty, too talky and too boring. The writer-director is his own editor. Somebody with much sharper scissors was needed. Even so, more of the fascinating Doctor Sleep stuff in the geriatric home would be welcome. The film is called Doctor Sleep after all, and not Danny Torrance, or even Abra Stone or Rose the Hat. Rose the Hat is called Rose the Hat because she is Rose and wears a Hat. Abra Stone is short for Abracadabra. Probably you don’t need to know that. Creepily, the white cat is the most appealing character in the movie, unless you are a dog lover.

Story-wise, while conjuring up the weirdest of horror plotlines, King gleefully uses serious issues like alcoholism, child abduction and abusive parenting for entertainment, like he does in It, and that is a problem, certainly one of taste and judgment. He doesn’t cross any lines, but he treads on them.

Under very difficult circumstances, Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran give very strong performances, though McGregor and Ferguson are hardly the first actors you would expect to see in their roles. Nevertheless Ferguson is a lot of unpleasant fun as the film’s villainess, and McGregor is a good enough actor to go at least part of the way in holding the centre of the storm that is this movie, though his quiet, dignified turn makes it hard to fill all the screen’s empty spaces. McGregor as Jack Nicholson’s son? Maybe not. Talking Jack Nicholson, his ghost hovers over Doctor Sleep. He is much missed here.

Mike Flanagan’s direction is attentive, sometimes imaginative, and as writer he has probably made a faithful attempt to bring King’s thing to the screen. Maybe the trouble is King’s bizarre sequel novel. One thing in its favour is that it is not short of fertile imagination.

[Spoiler alert] And, yes, you do need to watch The Shining before watching Doctor Sleep to understand the movie. But, then again, that’s a good thing. Flanagan gets us to the original Overlook Hotel for the film’s finale, and re-creates the sets and sequences brilliantly. But what is the point of this? We already have The Shining. Cannibalising The Shining is a bad idea. Respectful and painstaking, and even sometimes entertaining, though Doctor Sleep is, Kubrick must be turning over in his grave. The Shining wasn’t really a horror film. It was an art movie. Flanagan tries to deliver both, and it is to his considerable credit that he nearly succeeds in both departments.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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