In the dark: Leader movie reviews

‘Doctor Sleep’ serves as sequel to Kubrick’s ‘Shining,’ not King’s

Not a classic, but solidly watchable

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Among the legendary divided fandoms of pop culture — Elvis Presley versus The Beatles, Marvel versus DC — perhaps none are more irreconcilable than fans of Stephen King’s original 1977 novel “The Shining” versus Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation, because they really are two completely different stories.

Full disclosure: I’m a Kubrick fan. King is an excellent writer, whose talent deserves more respect. Academia may grudgingly acknowledge the artistry of long-departed horror writers like Edgar Allan Poe, but it’s slower to extend that same courtesy to their modern successors.

At the same time, King needs a strong editor to tame his more troublesome tics, and especially when it comes to movie adaptations, we’ve seen what happens when he gets everything he wants, as in the 1997 ABC TV miniseries adaptation of “The Shining” by Mick Garris.

The reason any of this matters is that, while King published “Doctor Sleep” in 2013 as a sequel to his novel of “The Shining,” writer-director Mike Flanagan made his movie adaptation of “Doctor Sleep” as a sequel to Kubrick’s film version.

Like a good editor, Mike Flanagan knows which bits of fat he needs to trim away, as he demonstrated in his 2017 Netflix adaptation of King’s 1992 novel “Gerald’s Game.” And perhaps more importantly, Flanagan clearly understands what a profound influence Kubrick’s “The Shining” has had upon filmmaking and modern culture as a whole.

In many ways, this is literally a ghost-haunted production. Shelley Duvall (who played the put-upon Wendy Torrance) and the sadly departed Scatman Crothers (as Dick Hallorann, the old man who taught young Danny Torrance about his gift of “shining”) are replaced effectively here by Alex Essoe and Carl Lumbly, but the original actors’ indelible performances are part of the long shadow that Kubrick’s version of the Overlook Hotel casts over this story.

And Flanagan leans hard into those memories of the original film, not only with obvious cues such as the same ominous musical score, the same title card text fonts, and even a few shot-for-shot recreations of scenes from Kubrick’s “The Shining,” but also with countless subtle homages, such as a chat with Bruce Greenwood, as an Alcoholics Anonymous group leader, that almost perfectly mirrors the colors and framing of the job interview scene from “The Shining,” with Barry Nelson as the manager of the Overlook Hotel.

“Doctor Sleep” shows us the low ebb and slow recovery of an adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor puts the skills he honed playing an addict in “Trainspotting” to good use here), who hasn’t quite banished the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel from his life, but has at least learned to lock them away for a while, as he’s psychically contacted by a girl named Abra Stone, who also possesses “the shining.”

In a parallel narrative, we’re introduced to the True Knot, a nomadic band of psychic energy parasites who feed off “the steam,” or the life force, of those who “shine” like Danny and Abra.

The inevitable showdown is telegraphed almost from the outset of the film, as we see the True Knot recruit Snakebite Andi (Emily Alyn Lind), a mind-controller who preys on sexual predators, and we’re introduced to the group’s de facto leader, Rose the Hat, a fascinatingly playful and vicious monster, played with a full range of fun, fear and fury by Rebecca Ferguson (whom I’m now looking forward to seeing in the 2020 adaptation of “Dune” more than ever).

Between the two of them, Danny and Abra are able to partially repel the advances of the True Knot, but our “shining” duo knows they won’t be able to evade or hold off the relentless predators forever, so Danny takes them to the one place where even greater terrors dwell.

While the threat of the True Knot winds up being a bit too truncated for my taste, I wish the final act in the reawakened Overlook Hotel could have gone on far longer, even though this film already clocks in at more than two and a half hours, because let’s be honest, Danny versus the Overlook is the heavyweight title fight that all the fans of Kubrick’s “The Shining” have been waiting to see.

And yes, you will see the return of almost all the spooks and specters who haunted the Overlook in the original film, but to me, the key scene is Danny’s confrontation with the one ghost he’s been running from his whole life, as the two finally face each other, both now grown men.

Along the way, we get welcome performances from Cliff Curtis as Danny’s AA sponsor and best friend Billy Freeman, Zahn McClarnon as True Knot member Crow Daddy, and Carel Struycken, as tall, bald and creepy as ever, as Grandpa Flick, the eldest member of the True Knot.

“Doctor Sleep” is not the equal of Kubrick’s classic, not by a long shot, but as sequels to classics go, it’s as good as other homages to Kubrick.

It arguably diminishes the original somewhat by dispelling some of its mysteries, but it’s a solidly skillful, humanizing tribute to an unparalleled legend.