Docxtor sleep3/26/2023 Together, they run afoul of a smoky-eyed cultist called Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), who dresses like Stevie Nicks, leads a band of drifters around the country in a horde of RVs, and wears a black flat-brimmed hat that I can only describe as jauntily foreboding. He meets another psychic, a teenage girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran), on the astral plane. Flanagan doesn’t give this material short shrift: McGregor is convincing as a tortured soul dragging himself toward stability, a crucial arc for King (whose Shining novel was far more about Jack’s struggles with addiction than Kubrick’s movie was).Īlongside that narrative of redemption, though, is an arcane and sometimes tedious attempt to delve deeper into the extrasensory “shining” power Danny was born with. Now all grown up, Danny is an alcoholic, drinking to ward off the demons of his past eventually he finds a stable job as an orderly at a hospice and works on conquering his problems through a 12-step program. But it never quite figures out how to bring the two styles together.ĭoctor Sleep follows Danny Torrance (played by Ewan McGregor), best remembered as the psychic little boy of The Shining who was tormented by the Overlook Hotel’s visions of death and eventually chased around the building by his mad father, Jack. Over its 151-minute running time, Doctor Sleep floats between the bleak and mournful themes of King’s writing and the chilling, inimitable dread of Kubrick’s filmmaking. Flanagan actually succeeds as well as he can on both fronts. It’s an ambitious undertaking, given both the strangeness of King’s original book and the impossibility of following up one of Kubrick’s most legendary films. On the other, it’s a loving homage to Kubrick’s film, one that painstakingly re-creates the look and feel of its most famous location, the haunted Overlook Hotel. On one hand, Doctor Sleep is a long, measured, and fairly faithful adaptation of King’s work. In taking on this follow-up, Flanagan has attempted to combine King’s world-building and Kubrick’s departures from it. King’s Doctor Sleep pointedly avoided any reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, an adaptation that the author has frequently decried, despite its lofty status in the horror-movie canon. It's never brought up again in the film even though it's a demon that follows Danny for a very long time because he stole from them.Let me try to sum up Doctor Sleep as simply and sanely as possible: The film, written and directed by the emerging horror maestro Mike Flanagan, is based on Stephen King’s 2013 novel, which is itself a sequel to King’s 1977 classic, The Shining. Later in the film, Danny witnesses both of them in his bed as corpses. To someone who hasn't read the book, the scene may simply play as a creepy nightmare and not a confirmation that she and her child were killed. In the movie: Danny spots Tommy, but he's never near a table full of drugs or crying out "Canny." He plants the toddler next to his mother, just like in the book, and takes some of her cash. It's something that continuously haunts him throughout the book, especially because he later surmises that Tommy died at the hands of his abusive uncle and Deenie took her life as a result. Mama."ĭanny picks up the child and brings him to his mother. The child cries out, believing it to be candy saying, "Canny. On his way out of the apartment, Danny spots a toddler, Tommy, with a bruised arm standing by a few lines of coke. In the book: When Danny wakes up in Deenie's bed and discovers he's missing $500, he decides to take the money Deenie has left in her purse.
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