Running time: 2 hours 31 minutes.At the start of Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is an alcoholic struggling with the memories and ghosts attached to the Overlook Hotel. Nothing that will keep you awake at night, but you probably won’t fall asleep in the middle either. ( “It” managed to be both “It Chapter Two” failed to be either.) There are some bad sections - the gratuitously sadistic rendering of a Knot victim’s fate - and some not-bad ones. It’s a Stephen-King-invites-you-to-ponder-the-nature-of-evil kind of movie. “Doctor Sleep” is a not a Stephen-King-scares-the-pants-off-you kind of movie. It’s not clear what they plan to do with Abra, but she and Dan fight back using wild mental tricks which Flanagan conveys by means of mostly pedestrian, occasionally surprising special effects. Sometimes, as in the case of a sullen teenager (Emily Alyn Lind), the Knot recruits youngsters instead of devouring them. The Knot feeds on steam, which is the soul energy (or something) that escapes from shiners in their death throes.
Their leader is Rose (Rebecca Ferguson), a blue-eyed seductress in a Babadook hat. Her powers attract the attention of a predatory cabal known as the Knot, who travel the country in a caravan looking for psychically talented children to torture and kill. Though if his extrasensory abilities shine, hers blaze like stadium lights. The ghouls who used to haunt him have been put away, thanks to a mental trick he learns from the ghost of his old pal Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly, in the role played by Scatman Crothers in “The Shining.”)ĭan joins forces with a young girl named Abra (Kyliegh Curran, making an impressive film debut), who lives in another part of New Hampshire and who has gifts similar to his. He also finds a job, as an orderly in a home for the elderly, and a friend, named Billy (Cliff Curtis).
After his mother’s death, he spirals into alcoholism, eventually finding solace and sobriety in a small New Hampshire town. He remembers a dad (Henry Thomas) with darting Jack Nicholson eyebrows and a mother (Alex Essoe) with Shelley Duvall saucer eyes.ĭan, played by a subdued Ewan McGregor, has had a hard time of it. Flanagan, while hewing more closely to the novelist’s ideas about evil, innocence and addiction, pays tribute to some of Kubrick’s visual signatures, especially in flashbacks that take grown-up Dan (as he’s called now) back to the Overlook. King was never a fan of Kubrick’s cold, meticulous gothic, which has nonetheless gathered a sturdy cult following. The new film, depending on how you look at it, is a sequel, an update, a corrective or a disaster. That was in “The Shining,” published by King in 1977 and filmed by Stanley Kubrick in a movie released in 1980. “Doctor Sleep,” Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of the novel by Stephen King, catches up with Danny Torrance, who as a child was terrorized by demons and his own father at a spooky Rocky Mountain hotel.
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