The Shining? Scooby Doo with better CGI

Wh e e e e r e ’ s Johnny? Nearly 40 years ago Jack Nicholson went berserk in a snowbound Rockies hotel, smashing an axe through a bathroom door behind which a popeyed Shelley Duvall cowered in terror. It is one of cinema’s truly iconic scenes, once voted the most petrifying in movie history.

Now award yourself points if you remember that the family in The Shining were called Torrance. They had a son, Danny, a psychic little boy haunted by apparitions as he pedalled on his trike along the corridor’s hallucinogenic carpets. Danny has now grown up into Dan Torrance and assumed the form of Ewan McGregor who stars in the sort-of-sequel Doctor Sleep.

The Shining was, arguably, the crowning achievement of Stanley Kubrick, one of those rare filmmakers accorded the accolade of an exhibition devoted to his oeuvre, which recently ended at the Design Museum. If you are going to bring the world of a masterpiece back to life, you’d better be good. The director of Doctor Sleep is Mike Flanagan. For anyone not steeped in the horror genre, his middle name may as well be Who?

Doctor Sleep begins with a bird’s eye view of a lushly green sunlit forest. Subtext: we’re not in Colorado any more. A little girl is warned by her mother not to wander too far from the camper van and soon enough she is being sweet-talked by a seductive woman in a gaucho hat. Rose the Hat (which is a dumb name) leads a creepy posse of roadies and groupies who (as ludicrously) call themselves the True Knot. They have the ability not to age, so look just the same in 1980 when we first meet them as they do in the present day. Meanwhile, there’s Danny, now Dan. He’s first glimpsed as a troubled boy learning to live with his psychic power — the shine, as his mentor from the far side calls it. By the time we catch up with him in adulthood, he’s an alcoholic cokeaddled hobo.

All would be well with Dan, but then he starts receiving messages from a psychic child called Abra (Kyliegh Curran). Abra reports the murder of a boy by the True Knot. Before you can say alakazam, they have teamed up to confront and destroy Rose the Hat and co.

Doctor Sleep is a lot sloppier than The Shining. It’s also way less scary. Rebecca Ferguson scowls and prowls like a rock vid vamp, storing the breath of her victims in swanky thermoses. Ewan McGregor is as ever the personification of decency but cannot quite shake a Ready Brek glow of blandness. It’s all a bit Scooby Doo with better CGI.

It becomes clear what’s missing when the plot, having magicked its way round several awkward corners, eventually bears down on the famous old hotel. There Dan has an encounter with a Jack Nicholson doppelgänger and even pokes his head through the famous bathroom door (here’s Danny!). There’s also a good lookalike for Shelley Duvall. While the homage dutifully ticks these boxes it misses the vital one: there’s not a whiff of psychological savagery. Instead you get a vague stench of cinematic necrophilia. Also, at twoand-half hours, someone should have swung an axe.