A duller Shining

Doctor Sleep, Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of the novel by Stephen King , catches up with Danny Torrance, who as a child was terrorized by demons and his own father at a spooky Rocky Mountain hotel.

That was in The Shining, published by King in 1977 and filmed by Stanley Kubrick in a movie released in 1980. The new film, depending on how you look at it, is a sequel, an update, a corrective or a disaster. King was never a fan of Kubrick’s cold, meticulous gothic, which has nonetheless gathered a sturdy cult following. Flanagan, while hewing more closely to the novelist’s ideas about evil, innocence and addiction, pays tribute to some of Kubrick’s visual signatures, especially in flashbacks that take grown-up Dan (as he’s called now) back to the Overlook. He remembers a dad (Henry Thomas) with darting Jack Nicholson eyebrows and a mother (Alex Essoe) with Shelley Duvall saucer eyes.

Dan, played by a subdued Ewan Mcgregor, has had a hard time of it. After his mother ’s death, he spirals into alcoholism, eventually finding solace and sobriety in a small New Hampshire town. He also finds a job, as an orderly in a home for the elderly, and a friend, named Billy (Cliff Curtis). The ghouls who used to haunt him have been put away, thanks to a mental trick he learns from the ghost of his old pal Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly, in the role played by Scatman Crothers i n The Shining.)

Meanwhile — well, there’s a whole lot of meanwhile.

In print, Doctor Sleep runs to 531 pages, which is fairly compact by King’s recent standards. This screen adaptation feels like a clumsy hybrid. It’s a little too long and winding to work as a feature film, especially in the horror genre, and might have worked better as a limited series, with a little more room for the many characters who populate its grimly imagined American landscape. Its slow pacing and diffuse suspense make the experience more like a book on tape than anything else, in spite of a few lively performances.