Doctor Sleep
King sequel loses shine
Doctor Sleep (R16, 152 mins) Directed by Mike Flanagan Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★
The greatest advice in film editing is ‘‘get in late, get out early’’. It applies to every shot, every scene and – eventually – the entire movie. Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep isn’t a behemoth by his standards. But it is still well over 500 pages. Two entire chapters are devoted to a goddamn cat.
Compressing all of that, even into a two-and-a-half-hour running time, is a fool’s errand. All you’ll finish up with is a film that leaves out essential events and context and still be far too long. So, maybe Doctor Sleep shouldn’t have been a film at all. It should have been a TV series.
Doctor Sleep picks up the story of Danny Torrance – the son in The Shining – 40 years later. As played by Ewan McGregor, he’s an alcoholic, a drifter and a man we sense would have killed himself years ago if he didn’t know how hellish a life after death could be.
A shock – one that must have given McGregor a little Trainspotting deja vu – scares Danny into rehab. But with his mind clear for the first time in decades, Danny’s ‘‘shine’’ reappears. And all manner of voices and messages start to arrive.
Danny finds himself communicating with a young girl who lives hundreds of miles away. And she is a witness – telepathically – to a horrific murder in yet another part of the country.
A deadly game of psychic hide and seek ensues, with the murderers trying to abduct young Abra for their own horrific purposes and Danny trying to save her, as he was once saved himself. Eventually, all roads lead to Colorado and The Overlook Hotel, the setting of The Shining .It sounds promising, if you’re a fan of King at all. But on the screen, Doctor Sleep is a frightless trudge, too rushed to ever build any real tension or dread, but far too slow to really work as a decent horror.
As a four or six-part series, I reckon it could have worked a treat. And writer-director Mike Flanagan would have been the perfect choice to make that series. Flanagan already has the stupendously good The Haunting of Hill House on his CV, which suggests he would have made a terrific job if Doctor Sleep had been allowed to really hit its stride.
Although, you might have wanted someone else in the lead. McGregor is great, in the service of a great script.
But here, mumbling his way through screeds of exposition, McGregor just reminded me that he once made fighting Darth Vader with a light saber look about as dynamic as a game of draughts with your mum. Cliff Curtis finds a few decent moments playing that King cliche, the ‘‘ethnic best friend’’, but there’s really not much here for him to work with.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Ferguson plays the leader of the murderous horde with her sneer dialled up to 11 from the start and nowhere much else to go. And newcomer Kyliegh Curran is mostly terrific as the telepathic kid-in-peril.
Doctor Sleep isn’t a bad film, exactly. There’s quality and a visible budget in most of what’s on screen. But by the time we reach the last half hour or so, set mostly in a CGI-enhanced recreation of The Overlook, surely only fans of the Kubrick’s The Shining will understand the significance of the staging and events.
As one of those people, I just found the whole attempt to revisit and recreate Kubrick mostly pointless and risible.
Or, maybe the problem is this: after a few stonkingly good series of Stranger Things, which was the essence of everything we loved about Stephen King in the 80s and 90s, percolated, boiled down and spread lovingly over 12 episodes, maybe this return to one overlong movie, too faithfully based on King’s own tired formula, was never going to be particularly good.
As for movie adaptations of King, maybe it’s time to heed the immortal words of Steve Hansen: To just pull the chain and move on. But I hope – and know – that someone will soon enough prove me wrong. And that makes me happy, too.