Heeeeeeere's Ewan!
Almost forty years ago, Kubrick created, as he often did, a landmark in a genre with 1980's The Shining. To modern eyes, it may be a slow burn, and with some oddities (like Kubrick apparently expecting the arrival of a Tuesday to be worthy of fright), but Jack Nicholson's electrifyingly entertaining performance as the insanity-embracing Jack Torrence is damn well worth a watch, and the surreal imagery provokes discussion and increasingly fractal theories to this day. Either way, it's a classic, and to me, the Room 237 sequence is a benchmark for how to raise your cinematic tension to a knife-edge.
In any case, down the line, Stephen King wrote his own sequel to the original novel of The Shining--and now Hollywood, never one to let any King work go un-adapted or un-butchered, made a movie from that, which also happens to be more of a sequel to the Kubrick movie. Confused? Well, let's not beat around the hedge maze and get stuck in either way.
The film picks up more or less right after The Shining, and then skips to about forty years later--though we are treated to seeing the more or less immediate after effects on a young Dan Torrance and his family. We even get some familiar characters like Dick Hallorann--who I at first thought was played by a horrifyingly convincing CG double, but it turns out they just cast lookalikes. I don't know why I'm glad about that, but I am. In either case, we're also introduced to our group of antagonists, lead by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), who are seemingly some sort of vampires feeding off psychic power--the Shining itself--for the sake of immortality.
We pick up with Dan in the 2010s, played by McGregor--whose American accent wavers up and down through the film, but he certainly makes a damn fine effort at portraying a slightly traumatized alcoholic whose powers still resurface occasionally. In parallel is the story of young girl Abra (Kyliegh Curran), who becomes the next target of the Shining-stealers--and being mutual psychics, it's not long before she and Dan get pulled into one another's lives.
For the most part, the film is more on the lines of a contemporary Stephen King movie than the Kubrick original--which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it's pulled off competently enough. Indeed, save for the opening and the climax, the connections to the Shining film itself are somewhat incidental, though it doesn't shy from them. Compared to Kubrick's misanthropic showing of descent into madness and murder, this is the opposite--about people with shared interests coming together to rise up against the evil before them. It doesn't have the same weight, but it's more crowdpleasing, and there's still room for its moments of horror--like one genuinely disturbing scene where the villains get their hands on an innocent victim. I honestly found it far more harrowing than anything involving Pennywise, perhaps indeed because these baddies are rather more human.
That being said, as the film goes on, let's just say I sort of wish that the Shining-stealers could've been presented as just a little more of a threat--but you'll certainly find yourself egging on Ewan and Abra as they try to outwit and confront them. And as the marketing makes abundantly clear, it all ultimately comes back to the Overlook Hotel from the original film--there's fanservice for that aplenty, but it also comes with one pretty emotionally potent scene where Dan finally confronts his alcoholism (a recurring theme through King's work), in a slightly unexpected way. Of course, all the madness there follows...
Overall, while Doctor Sleep doesn't quite have the memorable macabre mindfuckery of the Kubrick film--which I am all too happy to make comparisons to as this one and its advertising do--it's still a solid flick for what it aims to be and what it does, and is, well, probably more accessible to the current viewer. In all honesty, next to IT Chapter Two and Pet Semetary, it's possibly the best Stephen King film of the year. While there are some things I felt they could've done differently, it's not anything I'd take a fireaxe to--check it out.
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