Review: Doctor Sleep
When I saw Dr Sleep for the first time last year, I was already onboard with Mike Flanagan’s directing style, Hush and Hill House were both firm favourites and his previous King adaptation Gerald’s Game was a great little low-key horror piece. So having him helm a nearly 40 year old sequel to the Shining made sense and I was excited to see what he brought, and he brought a lot, making not only a worthy sequel but a film that actually surpasses the original in more than a few ways.
It’s been decades since the incident at The Overlook but Danny Torrance is still haunted by ghosts, both literal which he’s able to lock away in a mental prison thanks to the guidance from Dick Halloran, and figurative which he drowns out with alcohol. After one too many forgotten nights and waking up under a bridge, Danny tries to escape as far as he can, finding himself in New Hampshire where he meets Billy Freeman who takes Danny under his wing and agrees to be his AA sponsor, at the same time Danny starts to be psychically contacted by Abra Stone, a young girl who also has The Shine and can sense Danny’s abilities across the country.
Eight years later, Danny – now going by Dan – is fully sober and working in a hospice to comfort dying patients, Abra is now a teenager and enjoying her talks with Dan, both seem to be having simple but enjoyable lives. But of course things don’t stay simple, because a group of seemingly immortal beings called The True Knot, led by Rose The Hat, have been capturing anyone they can find with even the slightest bit of ‘Shine’ to them and feeding their immortality by cannibalising their victims. After a particularly gruesome murder of a young boy which Abra is able to pick up from her immense powers, Rose realises that feeding on Abra would sustain the starving group for years to come. With no other option, Abra turns to Dan for help, but Dan has closed that chapter of life away for good and knows that opening it again would be disastrous for everyone.
At two and a half hours, this is a slow burning film, but it has to be because there’s a lot of moving parts, the running storyline of Dan and Abra facing off against Rose and The True Knot is enough to move the story forward but there’s so much more going on, Dan’s trouble with alcohol and his attempts to forget about the traumas of The Overlook, Abra’s search for someone just like her and how her brazen actions come back to bite her, Rose’s sick and twisted mindset and how desperate she in to save her people no matter the cost, and that’s all before even showing the new elements to what The Shine can do now. It’s a story that uses the basic outline of The Shining to build something new onto, in this case the handling of trauma in the context of a horror movie, hell for the first two hours this could’ve been it’s own piece that’s only tangentially connected to The Shining before going all the way in the final act towards embracing its roots. Some might say the last half hour is using too much nostalgia, and they’re not wrong but I loved where the film went and how it used Kubrick’s film to set the stage for this finale.
Acting was strong across the board, practically no-one gave a bad performance, Abra’s parents weren’t in a lot of scenes but we got a good sense of who they were, her father didn’t want to acknowledge his daughter’s powers and was shaken to his core when faced with unavoidable proof while her mother was aware of them but didn’t know how to properly broach the subject in a way that hurt Abra, or hurt herself knowing the truth. Likewise Jacob Tremblay from Room has one scene as True Knot victim Bradley but his torturous screams of agony make him impossible to forget, as is Henry Thomas who has a cameo role as The Bartender and plays into the origins of the character exceedingly well.
Cliff Curtis has a small but substantial role as Dan’s friend and sponsor Billy, in a world filled with violence and trauma Billy being one of the only decent and genuinely good people stood out, he was exactly the person Dan needed at the point in his life and his continued friendship over the years makes him easy to root for overall. Personally I would’ve liked a little more of him, especially once Dan comes clean to him about his powers, but the time we had was enough to understand his relationship with Dan and shine a little light onto this world.
On the other side of the coin, members of the True Knot were utterly despicable and all of them enjoyed the torture and death way too much, often taking ‘Shine’ looked like taking ecstasy. Standout within the group including newcomer Snakebite Andi who had a youthful appearance but used that to hide a sinister and fucking evil soul while second-in-command Crow Daddy was a calm figure which just made his rare moments of anger even more terrifying when they flared up.
Rose The Hat, played with murderous glee by Rebecca Ferguson, was a great villain and should stand out as one of the best Stephen Girl antagonists to date. I’d imagine some Shining purists might be disappointed by her inclusion, Kubrick’s film made the evil more psychological in its corruption of Jack whereas Flanagan has put an actual human face to that evil through Rose but honestly, Ferguson is so good in the role that I don’t mind. Rose is pure fucking evil, through the course of the film she kills children (and yes that is plural for a reason) and constantly threatens Abra, getting more and more deranged as her attempts to catch Abra off-guard are thrown back in her face. And Ferguson seems to revel in it, she has this wonderfully twisted smile on her face whenever she’s torturing or killing someone, enjoying the moment, adding just a little sensuality to hint at some sexual gratification but never letting us forget that she’s a bare-footed, blood-thirsty bitch and she’s incredible to watch as such.
Abra herself is an absolute find, played by newcomer Kyliegh Curran who damn near steals this film out from everyone, Abra is fully aware of her shining powers and can already use them to great effect with basically no training, which is how she’s able to contact Danny at the start of the film. And this is both to her credit and her detriment, when Rose tries to get inside Abra’s head she underestimates and Abra gets back at her in quite a harsh fashion, but by using her powers so brazenly she put herself at risk of discovery and Rose will stop at nothing to find her. Curran is pretty fantastic in the role with an uncanny ability to perfectly grab onto a range of emotions, she’s confident when showing off her powers, cold-hearted when threatening members of the True Knot, terrified when she feels the pain of others being tortured, hell in one scene she does a great McGregor impersonation when Dan has to possess her for a bit. She’s a great addition to the Shining story and I’m hoping to see more of Curran in the future.
Rounding out the cast was Dan Torrance, played by Ewan McGregor, and time has not been kind to Danny, his attempts to forget about the Overlook have taken him to the same alcoholism as his father and apart from the occasional visit from Halloran, he’s completely alone in the world. Finding a connection with Abra is an important step for Dan, it gives him someone else that he can connect to about his powers but it also allows him the chance to be a better surrogate father to Abra than his real one was to him and break the cycle in a way Jack tried and failed to do. McGregor does great work as Dan, having this tortured look about him that just increases the more pain the film throws at him – his conversations with The Bartender being a highlight of the film and McGregor’s acting – but with shades of a man trying to better himself alongside that. At the start of the film Dan has a one-night stand with a single mother and leaves her unconscious in her own sick and her infant kid on the same mattress and it isn’t until long after the fact that he starts feeling guilty that he might have left them to their death, he’s not a bad person but he’s a selfish one and that still resonates even after he turns his life around, with him not wanting much to do with Abra when she asks for help. McGregor balances Dan’s arc well, never making him too much of a wash-out that his turn towards goodness feels unearned and keeping the film moving through his attempts to stay on the right path.
As previously mentioned the film is brought to us by Mike Flanagan in what is to my mind his best film work yet – Hill House is best overall and that’ll take some beating. Obviously The Shining is a classic film and it’s influences are still felt today so tackling a sequel is hard work, even with Stephen King’s book as a outline, the film and book Shining are so different that tying to two together seems like an unnecessary extra pain. But Flanagan tries and succeeds, I won’t spoil how but the ending ties into both the original book and the King’s ending to The Shining without feeling tacked on or silly.
But even before that, Flanagan is able to build something special out of this story, I’ll say straight up that this isn’t as scary as The Shining – though honestly I never found The Shining to be that scary despite what my dad says – but I never found that it was trying to be. Don’t get me wrong, there are horror elements, the powers of The True Knot are too fucked up not to be horrifying, Rose in particular has this fantastic Astral Projection scene where she seeks out Abra that’s as beautiful as it is chilling, plus the entire final act uses The Shining’s pedigree and brings back that innate weirdness that Kubrick wielded to give the finale a good kick into high gear. Plus Flanagan uses dread exceedingly well, from the very first scene with The True Knot there’s this undercurrent of unsettledness that keeps you on your toes, helped immensely by a thumping heartbeat on the soundtrack which gets louder whenever danger is nearby. There’s always this feeling of unease, we see a lot more of what The Shine can do here but that doesn’t mean we know everything, Rose’s ability to cross psychically linked space to touch others from miles away, Andi’s powers of persuasion – which she uses to horrifying effect after a fantastic standoff about 2/3rds through the film – there’s still a lot of unknown about what The Shine can do and that is still a part of horror on its own terms.
Instead though, saw this as a dramatic story wearing the skin of a horror movie, because at its core are familiar dramatic notes, dealing with trauma, overcoming addiction, surrogate families, the entire last act is a very literal case of facing your past to make up for your future. It’s something I’ve seen more and more in horror movies of late, The Babadook, Hereditary, even Hill House used the same principle, having horror mask very real emotions and I’ve always enjoyed the way horror films have been able to used that to their advantage. With Dan’s story they’re able to almost literally tackle the case of The Sins Of The Father, Dan’s never shown to hate Jack or what he did but that just makes his memory of him even harder to comprehend, this loving father who killed a man and tried to butcher him and his mother, it’s no wonder that Dan turned to drink. It’s an important distinction because I think it’s why I prefer this over the original film – and I know that’s controversial but I’m sticking by it – that dramatic weight adds so much more to this story and by contrast it actually enhances the original as well, where The Shining showed the destruction of the Torrance family through the corruption of Jack, this shows the recovery and redemption through Dan and Abra.
I’ve seen The Shining a number of times and my feelings on it ebb and flow, mostly positive but starting to see the wear and tear, with Dr Sleep I have a no found appreciation for the film as well as a sequel that takes a different path in its story without losing all ties to that original film. Some might say it’s too long at 2 and a half hours, some might say it uses too much nostalgia with it’s final act, some might say a lot of other bullshit because I loved this film, I loved the multi-layered story and how it tied back to the first film so well, I loved the cast with McGregor, Curran and especially Ferguson’s gleeful villain all playing off each other and I loved how Flanagan handled the story with patience, dread and dramatic weight in order to catch Danny Torrance in his lowest moments and bring him and The Shining story to a new light.
9/10