'Doctor Sleep' Bids Good Day To Mr. Kubrick

"Yeah but where's MY Dr. Sleep when I need him?"

Stephen King's 2013 novel Doctor Sleep is a sequel to his 1977 novel The Shining. It is most definitely not a sequel to Stanley Kurbick's 1980 movie The Shining, a movie King famously hated, and the book makes no real nods to Kubrick's interpretation of his story. King's Doctor Sleep exists in a world where the evil Overlook Hotel burned to the ground, and there was no such thing as a hedge maze.

But you can't make a movie sequel to The Shining and pretend Stanley Kubrick's version never existed, especially if you want to sell a lot of tickets. So director and writer Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is hybrid of both. It's King's story set in Kubrick's universe.

To accomplish this, Flanagan doesn't simply use original footage from The Shining. When it comes to incorporating moments from that earlier film into this one, he recreates and recasts, so that the film opens with young Danny Torrance riding his tricycle through those familiar hallways, passing a familiar doorway, and seeing a familiar bather in a familiar bathtub.

But we quickly see that this isn't the Danny we remember. He's been recast, along with his mother Wendy (by Roger Dale Floyd and Alex Essoe, respectively). And I'll admit I had a visceral negative reaction when I saw those new actors, even as I marveled at the masterfully recreated costumes and sets; I went in expecting a sequel, not a remake.

But that slavish recreation of The Shining is only a fraction of the film's (bloated) 151 minute running time, and the majority of the film centers on a grown up Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) who has learned to silence the very real demons that haunt him, through a combination of booze and mental lockboxes, the latter a trick taught to him by Dick Halloran (Carl Lumbly).

After hitting rock bottom he finds friendship and AA, settling down in a small New Hampshire town, taking on shifts at a hospice, where his psychic abilities lend themselves well in leading the dying into that good night. This skill earns him the nickname "Doctor Sleep."

The moments Dan Torrance spends with the dying, along with scenes of him at AA and embracing friendship, are all heartfelt and authentic, and imbue the film with a tenderness and sadness that is a welcome change of pace for a horror film, as is the inclusion of a young girl of color as the story's heroine. Teenage Abra (Kyliegh Curran) is also gifted with "the shine," and she develops an unlikely, sight unseen friendship with Dan. But her supernatural gifts are like a beacon to the band of baddies that are the film's villains.

Lead by a beautiful woman known as Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), the "True Knot" are a gang of vampiric gypsies who gain immortality from the "steam" the emanates from people like Abra and Dan, though steam from children--especially frightened, dying children--is the most powerful; they suck that shining out of their victims like bong hits.

Their murder of a young, "gifted" boy is perhaps the film's most horrifying and disturbing scene, and it's a reminder that much of The Shining was centered on the terrorizing of a child. And perhaps that's part of why that film has had such a lasting impact. We've all been scared children (the most unlucky being children scared of their own parents), and for adults who become parents, knowing their child might be in danger is perhaps the scariest thing of all.

Doctor Sleep delves into areas centered on the effects of trauma and the heredity of addiction, with Dan Torrance literally coming face-to-face with the spectre that was his murderous and alcoholic father, Jack (Henry Thomas, playing yet another creepy father character in a Mike Flanagan movie, fills in for Jack Nicholson), and it's when Dan is facing those kinds of demons that the film is its most effective. The trip back to the haunted Overlook, while certainly fun, in a pandering-to-the-fans kind of way, is just a Halloween attraction compared to the knowledge that you might grow up to be exactly like the person you most loved, feared, and hated.

Doctor Sleep is too long, and relies a bit too much on what Stanley Kubrick created before it. But it also did something The Shining, a scary but classically cold Kubrick movie, never could. It made me scared and sad.