Little Danny is all grown up...or is he?
There are some movies that don’t need sequels. Despite the insistence otherwise by Hollywood franchise creators, there’s something to be said for a standalone film. Can you imagine a direct sequel to Raging Bull? A Jake LaMatta 2: Boxing Boogaloo? What if someone decided we needed a prequel to Citizen Kane? Would they call it The True Story of Rosebud?
As a society, sometimes we just need to let things be. That seems impossible—there’s been talk of a remake of The Princess Bride, despite everyone seemingly understanding that absolutely no one wants to see it. Nostalgia culture has overtaken us. Nothing is new because we’re so busy remembering what was. And so we beat on like boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Anyway, Mike Flanagan, director of the excellent Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, directed a sequel to The Shining called Doctor Sleep. It is mostly adequate as its own movie, right up until it isn’t. As entertaining as it is, I’m not sure it ever really had a chance to stand alone. Stanley Kubrick haunts every corner of the film and, by the end of the film, Flanagan can only breathlessly remake the most famous parts of the original.
This film wouldn’t have been possible, of course, without the book by Stephen King. It seems even the best, most prolific writers can’t avoid the draw of nostalgia. King’s version, however, left much of the Overlook Hotel in the memory of his characters out of necessity. At the end of the book, the hotel had exploded. This wouldn’t do for a Hollywood sequel. Instead, so as not to upset anyone, Flanagan had to attempt to remain true to the book and the original film.
Doctor Sleep follows the further adventures of Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor), the telepathic son of axe wielding Jack from the first film. Danny has a “shine” to him, which caused the beings that haunted The Overlook to become more than just apparitions—they hunger for him. When he and his mother move to Florida after the events in Colorado, the creatures follow him.
Thanks to the help of Dick Halloran (Carl Lumbly, replacing Scatman Crothers), now himself an apparition after his murder by Danny’s father, Danny learns to lock the creatures away inside his mind. As Danny gets older, he hides his “shine” through alcoholism, becoming an angry shell much like his father.
Eventually, Dan gets clean and begins working as an orderly for a hospice, using his powers to help the dying. As the years pass, he begins an inadvertent “psychic pen pal” relationship with a young girl named Abra (Kyleigh Curran). Abra also “shines,” though she is much brighter than Dan. She accidentally attracts the attention of a roving group of quasi-immortal beings that eat people who “shine.” Dan must confront his past in order to give Abra a future.
Doctor Sleep is far more of a dark fantasy film than a horror. In fact, there’s only one scene that could be described as horrific, where a child is murdered by the psychic vampires. That was very difficult to watch thanks to the skilled acting of Jacob Tremblay.
The film is more of a character study, one that describes King’s own struggle with substance abuse, that ends in a nostalgic traipse through familiar scenes from The Overlook, lovingly recreated by Flanagan.
There isn’t anything wrong with this necessarily, although the end was easily telegraphed early, but for me it took the wind out of the narrative. Instead of continuing the mythology of the story, we end up back where we began.
Flanagan even took parts of the first book, which were left out of Kubrick’s version, and inserted them into Doctor Sleep. Done so to perhaps mend fences with King, who famously didn’t appreciate Kubrick’s changes.
Still, the film is well made. We expected nothing less from Flanagan, who is a capable filmmaker. But he’s not Stanley Kubrick.
Doctor Sleep was never going to be an effective sequel. The Shining is far too seminal a film to follow. The books are different animals—they’re all from the mind of Stephen King and he can do what he pleases with them. Kubrick’s version took the material and, at least in my mind, elevated it. Doctor Sleep doesn’t. All it does is remind us of what came before.