Doctor Sleep (2019)

☆ ☆ ☆

Doctor Sleep (2019) – M. Flanagan

As a movie about a battle between psychic people who communicate with the dead and a band of vampiric supernatural fiends, the movie kind of works.  But when it tries to serve as a sequel to Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) at the same time, the movie is a disappointment.  Ewan McGregor stars as a grown-up Danny Torrance, who has become an alcoholic (trying to drive away his demons … from the Overlook Hotel) but is ready to get sober and moves to a small New Hampshire town to do so.  We see some recreations of iconic scenes from his childhood in the hotel -- but jarringly with different actors; he also talks with the spirit of Dick Hallorann (previously the incredible Scatman Crothers but now a rather ho-hum Carl Lumbly).  Later the film also climaxes in recreated versions of the original sets with ham-fisted echoes of the earlier film.  It is hard to know whether director Mike Flanagan was required to make such tight connections or if he is such a fanboy that he wanted to copy Kubrick (surely a vain challenge).  On its own terms, Doctor Sleep feels a bit like a superhero film, perhaps similar to Hugh Jackman’s Logan (2017), with a fallible aging hero who needs to rise to the occasion.  That film too required the older hero to partner with a young girl (in this case, Kyliegh Curran) in order to defeat the baddies. A few sudden jolts notwithstanding the film isn’t really horror and it isn’t really action – instead, it seems to want to say something about addiction and recovery but that sombre theme isn’t really followed through.  I suspect many fans of Kubrick’s film won’t be able to resist watching this but you’ll be left wondering whether this film should have existed at all and surprisingly wishing that the overt relation to the earlier film was omitted.