Doctor Sleep (2019)
Directed by Mike Flanagan
Still scarred by the trauma he endured as a child at the Overlook Hotel, Dan Torrance faces the ghosts of the past when he meets Abra, a courageous teen who desperately needs his help -- and who possesses a powerful extrasensory ability called the "shine".
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What critics say influenced Doctor Sleep
Director Mike Flanagan ( Gerard’s Game ) does an excellent job in paying homage to, and continuing the story of The Shining , in both its literary and film versions.
Doctor Sleep, the nearly 40-years-later sequel to The Shining that arrives this week, is instead built around another aspect of that film that I never considered nearly as compelling—the "shining" of the title, possessed by the young Danny Torrance, which is a combination of psychic powers and the ability to communicate telepathically.
It’s not news to suggest that Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining (1980) does a questionable job adapting Stephen King‘s equally brilliant novel (1977) to the screen.
You’d think a sequel to one of the greatest psychological horror films of all time, the 1980 Kubrick classic “The Shining,” would be a disastrous, pointless mess.
It takes some serious nerve to direct a sequel to Kubrick's The Shining AKA One Of The Greatest Films Of All Time.
The Shining is pretty high up on the list of iconic movies that don’t need a sequel, remake, or reboot.
Flanagan has mentioned being inspired by the likes of Near Dark , taking Ferguson and her brood down the path of being like a malevolent group of immortal carnies.
Rose the Hat is a fascinating, layered villain as she commands a group of immortality-seeking psychic vampires, who aesthetically owe a debt to Kathryn Bigelow’s criminally underrated Near Dark (1987).
These "vampires" are new: nomadic, like the bloodsuckers from Near Dark , but interested only in "eating" fear and pain in the form of "steam" that sublimates from their victim's lips at the moment of their death.
Led by the seductively malevolent Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson, enjoyably flamboyant in her big-bad role), these nomadic Near Dark predators treat their pint-sized prey like living vape pens; triggering their pain and fear, they suck the shining straight out of them in puffs of vapor, slowing their own aging process.
A group of sinister Near Dark ish nomads encircle a little girl with the intent to abduct and, we soon learn, consume her.
Flanagan, who previously adapted King's supposedly unfilmable Gerald's Game, is definitely one to watch, whether he's tackling King or not.
Directed by Mike Flanagan ("Gerald's Game," "Before I Wake," "Oculus," "Still Life").
Screenwriter/director Mike Flanagan already has a proven relationship with author Stephen King having successfully adapted Gerald’s Game into a particularly unsettling feature.
The difference here is that writer and director Mike Flanagan (the fright maestro is responsible for the Netflix series Haunting of Hill House and one other Stephen King adaptation already in the underappreciated Gerald’s Game), adapting the 2013 book sequel of the same name, is blending that fan service with chills and substance.
Writer and director Mike Flanagan ( Gerald’s Game , Haunting of Hill House ) once again shows he is a master of storytelling and filmmaking.
The clever management of space and communication of interiority that brought Flanagan’s earlier King-adapted movie Gerald’s Game to life have inexplicably taken leave of him.
McGregor recalls a young Donald Sutherland here, his understated panic not unlike Sutherland’s in Klute and Don’t Look Now.
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McGregor recalls a young Donald Sutherland here, his understated panic not unlike Sutherland’s in Klute and Don’t Look Now.
Like his father Jack (originally played by Jack Nicholson, now by "E.T." star Henry Thomas), Dan Torrance has become an alcoholic, plus a drug-abusing drifter trudging through life while dealing with his clairvoyant abilities, referred to as "the shining."
In a departure from King’s “Doctor Sleep,” the action circles back to the Overlook for a history-repeating climax that’s mostly a comedown, complete with a bad-idea cameo from Henry Thomas, of “E.T.” Speaking of Spielberg, didn’t we just relive all this in “Ready Player One”?
And “E.T.”’s Henry Thomas trying to mimic Jack Nicholson?
Mr. Mercedes, The Mist, Castle Rock, Creepshow) and nine film adaptations (CELL, THE DARK TOWER, IT, 1922, GERALD’S GAME, PET SEMATARY, IT CHAPTER TWO, IN THE TALL GRASS, and now DOCTOR SLEEP).
Much like the recent shocker Midsommar , the film harks from the slow-burn school of movie horror, side-stepping the type of garish, poke-in-the-ribs style we saw in the recent It films for a more contemplative, brooding approach.
But King, still gold these days at the box office after the success of the IT movies, gets another shot as his novel Doctor Sleep — in which he revisits elements of The Shining — now is a major, but overlong, motion picture starring Ewan McGregor as the grown-up version of Danny Torrance, the son of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance from the original.
(Looking at you, Pet Sematary and both chapters of It.)
This year alone we’ve received updates of “Pet Sematary” and “It” in theaters and “In the Tall Grass” and “Castle Rock” on Netflix and Hulu.
The film runs on for an unnecessarily extended 151 minutes, and that’s undoubtedly a by-product of the success of “It,” the lengthy 2017 adaptation of the first half of King’s killer-clown novel.
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Initially, the scene has echoes of Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein” before it heads off in a terrifying direction all its own.
Starting shortly after the tragedy of the Overlook Hotel, Danny and his mother abscond to 1980 sun-dappled Florida, where we are also introduced to a gypsy caravan of supernatural beings known as The True Knot, a serial killing cult led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson, styled like the sexy femme fatale version of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight, 1927).