FILM REVIEW: DR SLEEP

​The much-hyped Dr Sleep finally arrived on our big screens just in time for Halloween and delivers an entertaining supernatural thriller rather than a genuinely scary horror film. The marketing campaign has also over-egged the strong connection the film has with Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining, to the extent that seeing posters of Ewan McGregor (Danny Torrence) looking through the door famously smashed by Jack Nicholson (Jack Torrence) in the original film almost put me off watching this continuation at all. I found that rather tacky, but money talks. Dr Sleep does make numerous connections to The Shining, but wisely goes not genuinely overdo it, and viewers are sure to enjoy the references. It is worth pointing out that Dr Sleep makes more connections to the original than King’s book does; the overtones connecting to The Shining are bound to be a box-office ticket seller and, not surprisingly, feature heavily in the trailers.

The first thing to clarify is whether this is a sequel to the Stephen King novel or the Stanley Kubrick film as they were quite different from each other? The answer is a bit of both and that creates a bit of a conflict, with the climax a definite tribute to Kubrick’s cinematic vision rather than King’s novel. As you might gather the ending of Dr Sleep is radically different from the book and I felt the conclusion of the film was very strong. At various points in the over-long 151-minute running time the book and the film veer in different directions, having said that it remains a relatively faithful adaptation and ranks as one of the better King adaptations to come along in recent years.

Expectations were justifiably high once Mike Flanagan came aboard as director, having been involved in several excellent projects in recent years including The Haunting of Hill House, Gerald’s Game, Hush and Oculus. Flanagan had a tough job; marrying King’s vision of transferring his book to the big screen and respecting the wishes of those who manage the estate of the late Stanley Kubrick was never going to be an easy job, but he seems to have kept both parties admirably happy.

The film opens with some brief scenes with Danny still as a boy trying to deal with the repercussions of what happened in the hotel and the death of his father, before skipping forward to 2011 when, like his father, he is a violent drunk and drifter. During these heavy drinking periods his gift, which he calls ‘the shining’ is dulled by the booze, but upon arrival in a new town he discovers Alcoholics Anonymous and turns over a new leaf. The story then makes another seven-year jump and Danny is still sober and working in a hospice. The patients call him ‘Dr Sleep’ as he uses his rediscovered ‘shining’ to ease their fears of dying and moving into the next life.

The film has two other major strands which eventually connect with Danny. There is a little girl in town who has an incredibly powerful ‘shine’ called Abra who is played by the excellent Kyliegh Curran who communicates with Danny via their gift for several years before they meet face to face. The other crucial plot involves a secret group of supernatural beings, slightly like vampires, who feed off the energy of people who have ‘shine’ ability which they call ‘steam’. This ‘steam’ exists in its purest essence in children and to extract the ‘steam’ they torture and kill the kids they locate who have it. However, as the years have gone by it has become harder to find kids with special abilities and the ‘True Knot’ group are becoming hungry and soon discover Abra and begin stalking her. However, she is a tough little girl and is also hunting them as she is aware of one of their most recent kills. These cat and mouse games go on slightly too long, in the middle section of the film, and contribute to the bloated running time.

‘Rose the Hat’ (Rebecca Ferguson) leads the ‘True Knot’ and she is unlikely to be remembered as one of King’s more memorable villains, either in book or film. She smiles a lot, is very flouncy and is more talk than action and carried little in the way of threat or menace apart in the brief torture scene. She was rather dull, this was a problem as she had a lot of screen time, and we are given little or no backstory on their origins, apart from the fact that they live for a very long time. The film wisely pulled back from the child torture in the book required to produce the ‘steam’ and reduces the number of child deaths compared to the book. Apart from ‘Rose the Hat’ the rest of the ‘True Knot’ were anonymous background figures and as bad guys were forgettable. ‘Snakebite Andi’ did have a great introduction scene, but then she also sadly disappeared, even though she had the dangerous ability to make people do anything she wanted by forcing her will upon them. And in the end the majority of the ‘True Knot’ were despatched remarkably easy, probably too easily.

Ewan McGregor carries the film very well and convinces as Danny Torrence, dealing with the demons of alcoholism and the responsibility of watching out for Abra when the ‘True Knot’ come knocking and the film is bolstered by a strong support cast. When Danny, Abra and Rose communicate with each other, or listen in on each other’s conversations, the film goes into fantasy mode where the listening is seen as an out of body experience. Although the special effects were very solid, it did not do much for tension and even less for adding any kind of horror.    

This entertaining film is hampered by its 151-minute running time and the fact that it is just not scary enough, if at all. It should be marketed as a supernatural thriller, as there is just not enough ‘horror’ to call it a genuine horror film. I do not believe I was caught out by a single scene in the entire film. In a crowd-pleasing finale we return to the Overlook Hotel and some nice cross-references with The Shining which were very respectful, and we were reintroduced to some of the ghosts from the original.

In Chad Clark’s superb Tracing the Trails: A Constant Reader's Reflections on the Work of Stephen King Clark made a fascinating observation about the Dr Sleep novel. He felt that the main character in the novel need not have been Danny Torrence, as in the book there are relatively few references to The Shining, and that with a different opening 50-60 pages it might have been an entirely different kind of novel. Perhaps a clever editor saw the financial potential of shoehorning this manuscript into the storyline of King’s most famous works? I tend to agree with Chad Clark, for most of the book they have little to do with each other and the ending of Dr Sleep, the novel, could have taken place anywhere, not the burned down Overlook Hotel, the film was not the same case.  
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This was a very solid and respectful follow-on to The Shining but is best not sold as a sequel and the director has made a fine job of merging the visions of both King and Kubrick. However, it lacked scares and although it was convincing it also lacked knockout scenes, but the return to the Overlook Hotel was a real treat.
4/5
Tony Jones