'Doctor Sleep' Review: The Sequel that Shines Bright

Mike Flanagan has done it again. The brilliant director of The Haunting of Hill House, Hush, and Ouija: Origin of Evil has come back to the big screen with a film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep. The novel is, of course, a direct sequel to The Shining… although this particular movie is actually a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation - and good god, it is fantastic.

I went into Doctor Sleep expecting it to be yet another mediocre Stephen King adaptation that is merely a cash grab trying to use nostalgia to empty people’s wallets… and boy, it was so much more than that. I won’t delve into spoilers until later on in the review so when you see the bold text you know it’s time to click off if you haven’t seen the film yet. Let’s get into it.

So, Doctor Sleep takes place a number of years after the events of The Shining, where Danny Torrance is now an adult dealing with alcoholism and trauma developed from The Overlook Hotel and his “Shine”. While the film’s run-time is over 2 hours and a half, it doesn’t feel like any single scene shouldn’t be there - even if… well… they spend a bit too long on some quite disturbing scenes. The film did feel quite lengthy at times, though, but I wasn’t exactly complaining.

The soundtrack for Doctor Sleep is beautifully composed, mixing both isolated eerie-sounding instruments and actual pieces of music depending on the context. The use of colour is extremely obvious but makes a lot of sense, and the cast are excellent across the board. Ewan McGregor delivers a wonderful performance as Danny, aswell as really the entire cast. Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, and Cliff Curtis lead an explosive cast that does the film justice.

Spoilers ahead.

While Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining explores the mind of Jack Torrance and his downfall into eventual madness, Doctor Sleep explores mental health in a much lighter tone. Recovery, acceptance, and comfort is the forefront of the story, even to the point of the film’s actual name. Danny gets the nickname Doctor Sleep as he uses his Shine to comfort the elderly on the brink of death in their final moments. Early on in the film, the ghost of Dick Hallorann refers to Danny as ‘Doc’ in a nod to him watching Looney Tunes as a kid with his mother.

Of course, all of this is in the book, so it’s not exactly an original screenplay but Flanagan does well in showing you this without telling you it, only having Bugs Bunny in the background once during a scene where viewers are more focused on the woman from Room 237 trying to eat Danny. Speaking of the spirits in the film, the use of jump-scares and actual horror is quite minimal, but that is Flanagan’s style - only jump-scaring when necessary or unexpected. The only time I actually jumped was when Danny returns to the bedroom in the Overlook Hotel where his father bust open the bathroom door with his axe in the infamous ‘Here’s Johnny!’ scene. Even then, it was because it immediately cut to a flashback rather than an actual jump-scare - but it showed how well the tension and anxiety of the surrounding environment got to my head.

In Stanley Kubrick’s original adaptation, it tries more to focus on the horror aspect that it doesn’t exactly delve too deep into its characters, and while The Overlook Hotel is a character in The Shining, it is an even bigger entity in Doctor Sleep. What the original novel, film adaptation and all direct works inspired by The Shining do extremely well, it’s make The Overlook Hotel one of the most unsettling locations in media history. Just thinking about its long, intricate hallways makes me shudder and in Doctor Sleep it’s no different.

Of course, the film has direct nods to the Kubrick film with recreations of iconic shots and even a remake of the opening scene where the Torrance family arrives at the hotel, and they were done so well it made me want to go back and watch the first film all over again. That’s both a compliment to the work of Kubrick and also Flanagan. There aren’t many criticisms I have for Doctor Sleep, other than the quite lengthy run-time and well… there was one scene which really dragged on too long and it was the least deserving scene of all to keep going.

When a young boy with the Shining gets kidnapped by the film’s antagonists, they tie him up and stab him repeatedly without the camera cutting away. It’s extremely disturbing and a massive switch-up from an otherwise lighter-toned movie. Now, this is an adaptation of a Stephen King book and a sequel to a Stanley Kubrick film - so a child being murdered by a cult isn’t exactly surprising. It was meant to be shocking and show how evil the antagonists were, but that doesn’t mean it had to drag on for that long. I don’t know - it just felt like an extremely unnatural time to change the pace of the movie. Prior to that scene, it was all fast paced, well edited and good exposition, but then the scene did not match the tone, pacing or message of the story at all.

It’s difficult to talk about because you can tell they intentionally made it much longer and slower than usual to make the scene that much more disturbing, but it just ruins the flow of the film. There are a few other scenes which just felt a bit longer than they should have been, such as the whole introduction of Snakebite Andi - she had more exposition than Abra Stone, one of the protagonists, for some reason. But other than pacing and run-time, I don’t really have much to complain about with Doctor Sleep.

I absolutely loved that Flanagan chose to re-cast Wendy Torrance, Dick Hallorann, and even Jack Torrance. They could have easily done one of those CGI remake style flashbacks, but I believe that re-casts were very necessary, although I will miss the original actors very much. The return of Jack in the form of a ghost named “Lloyd the Bartender” was such an interesting scene in terms of exploring what happened to Jack after he froze to death and how Danny actually sees his father after the events of The Shining. I was not expecting this sequel to be an indirect character study.

All in all, Doctor Sleep was much better than I expected it to be, and I’m glad I came out of it satisfied rather than disappointed at what I thought would be another nostalgic cash grab. If you love The Shining, go watch this movie.