Review: Doctor Sleep

Doctor Sleep is a lot of things – a sequel, a possible first installment in a new franchise, a chance for Stephen King to get one last kick into the movie version of The Shining and reclaim it as his own – but is it a horror movie?  Obvious it contains scary stuff - kids are murders by supernatural forces, so good news there for It fans - but that in itself doesn't make a movie scary. As shown by the second half of It, for starters.

 

So there answer here is "no, not really". Yes, the story does involve a band of soul-sucking almost-vampires who feed off what we know as “The Shining”, and the now grown-up Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) does face down a bunch of ghosts both literal and metaphorical. 

 

But for long stretches this film seems more interested in just hanging out with its cast as the bad guys – led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) - slowly circle in on Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), a young girl with a Shining stronger than anyone’s seen. Which rapidly makes her a decent match for the monsters, and when the good guys and bad guys are evenly matched what you've got isn't really all that horrific.

 

Most of the really interesting stuff here involves Danny’s battle with the bottle and his father’s drunken legacy; the monster stuff at times feels like the set up for a so-so series on Netflix. Horror buffs of a certain age might remember when Clive Barker's Nightbreed was considered (mostly by Barker himself) to be radical for treating the monsters as characters; these days it's hard to find a monster movie that doesn't, even if that almost always makes them a lot less scary.

 

Eventually the chase finds its way back to the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, and this kicks into a very different gear. It's not exactly a good sign that this only gets creepy when it starts directly ripping off Kubrick, but the differing effects are more a result of differing approaches than outright theft. 

 

For most of this film we're basically being told an fairly straightforward story in a fairly straightforward way (though there are a few nice moments when various supernatural powers are being used). But the scenes at the Overlook are largely concerned with creating mood and tension (the story being pretty much over). They're the first time this starts acting like a movie rather than a television serial, and the difference is startling.

Ironically, mood and tension are what make Stephen King's horror writing work, and they're almost always the first things discarded when adapting it for the screen. Kubrick's film may not have been a faithful adaptation, but it's still the only King adaptation to date (well, horror adaptation at least) to focus on what makes horror in general work: mood and tension. 

 

Being too literal is what ruins most adaptations; not being literal enough is why King's hated Kubrick's version all these years. Dr Sleep splits the difference, and doesn't really leave any mark at all.

- Anthony Morris