Dr. Sleep – a review

Years after his ordeal at the Overlook hotel Danny Torrance has grown up to become his father Jack. He is just as troubled and self-destructive.

But unlike his father he gets a second chance to become a better person by protecting a young girl, Abra, who has the supernatural power called ‘the Shining’, just like him.

Dr. Sleep is one of those movies that made me think about ‘movie theory’ in general a lot more than the actual movie review itself. There’s just so much to talk about on a lot of different levels.

Just like The Overlook hotel has many different doors that Danny Torrance rides by on his tricycle this review will, from time to time, quick fire ‘door after door’ of movie theoretical questions at you.

Good book, bad movie. Bad book, good movie.

Comparing a book to a movie is a tricky business.  You’re more likely to hear: “The book was better” than the other way around. The reason for this is simple: if a book is good not only is it already quite a daunting task to put it on screen just (as good) as it was written. But, also, more people have read the book. So there are a lot more potential criticasters.

In this sense you could also make the distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘obscure’.

A fun thing happens, however, if a director successfully manages to adapt a book to a movie: people tend to forget the original book. Hardly anybody knows that Psycho was once a book. And I doubt the people who do, have actually read it. The same goes for Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby and (I’m certain this will happen in my lifetime) Jurassic Park.

If you can name the writers connected to these books you get a virtual cookie with my compliments.

If a movie adaptation was a success it’ll henceforth be the movie first with the book, almost, an afterthought.

Which brings me to Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick.

In 1981 Kubrick produced a masterpiece of a movie called The Shining (1981) based on King’s bestseller of the same name. But since the original book and the movie are so vastly different (and because the author is still a successful writer I might add) two ‘cultural objects’ started to exist side-by-side. Each with its own author: Kubrick’s The Shining (the movie) and King’s The Shining (the original novel).

The mini-series (1997), lovely as it is, doesn’t really exist in this ‘auteur’ sense.

And if there’s one big critique I have to give the 2019 adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining is that the movie, in the end, tries too hard to incorporate both authors.

Stephen King’s Dr. Sleep.

Suddenly there was the news item: “Stephen King-master of horror- is soon to publish a sequel to The Shining called: Dr. Sleep.” (paraphrasing).

I bought the book the day it came out and started to read. And, I have to admit, at first I was disappointed. The book didn’t take place in a haunted hotel but was rather more a road-trip. The Danny Torrance character was an abysmal human being (in the first fifty pages or so). And the villains didn’t seem half as threatening as I wanted them to be (going up against super-power humans and all).

But the book grew on me the minute I realized that Dr. Sleep is all about addiction. Where the first book destroyed the addicted Jack Torrance in a self-destructive manner. Dr. Sleep actually offered Danny Torrance-who is on the same destructive path as his father, Jack-a way out.

The villains here are those ‘new’ addicts willing to destruct others for their own gain. And they are represented as a vampiric-cult known as the ‘True knot’ lead by the maleficent woman named Rose the hat.

More precise, the Knot’s addiction isn’t akin to alcoholism in the sense of ‘drinking one’s emotional pain away’ but rather drug-addiction of ‘getting the next shot because it is needed to ‘stay’ at any cost’.

Realizing this I could read Dr. Sleep as it really was. The book is not a retracing of the old steps but a re-exploration of the original themes by an older author whilst telling an entirely new story in a new setting. Yes it uses the same characters and the same hocus-pocus as before, but at a minimal since those things aren’t really important.

Dr. Sleep is basically an older Stephen King telling the reader (through Danny) about the dangers of addiction, the possibility of salvation and also, by including a Shining-little girl named Abra, the importance of parenting, educating and preparing the next generation.

By the way, the Overlook hotel got destroyed in the first novel. So in Dr. Sleep the finale takes place at the ruins of the Overlook.

Flanagan’s Dr. Sleep.

Stephen King has always been a very ‘filmable writer’. Meaning to say: even his most bonkers scenes are right there on the page described in full. So yes, near the end of IT the main character is flying in space talking to some intergalactic space turtle. The basic image is clear. The technical side of actually filming it is quite another story.

Dr. Sleep, therefore, is a very filmable book. There is a main character who looks like sh*t for the first fifty pages or so. Then he gets clean-shaven and is ‘ready to go’. The main villain, then, wears a very distinctive hat. It is all very visual.

So getting the shooting script together for this movie is rather easy. The dialogue is often already pretty solid. Only some subplots that would take the movie slightly off course (e.g. there are a lot of driving scenes in the novel) had to be removed to streamline it a bit.

And because the source material is already so visual, so is the dressing and the tone of the movie. The locations, landscapes, the ways characters look are all there on the page.

The big hurdle is, as always, the casting. Luckily King movies can nowadays pretty much call any actor in the world and he/she will accept. For Dr. Sleep the casting directors called Ewan McGregor as Dan Torrance, Rebecca Ferguson as Rose the Hat and Kyliegh Curran as Abra Stone.

McGregor is quite fitting as the tormented Torrance. Playing his character far more internally than he normally would he fits the profile of a man wanting to survive himself just another day.

I loved the (slightly sick) mention of a Shallow grave (1994).

Curran as Abra, then, is actually rather impressive as the youthful enthusiastic ‘Shiner’ who doesn’t know what dangers lie on the horizon.

She has a wonderful power scene in a car (was she wearing contacts that time?).

If I would give the character any faults it is that she is (as in the book) overpowered and hardly ever gets hurt like Danny does. But that’s character, not actress.

But the real steal of the show is Ferguson as Rose the Hat. What is it with Stephen King adaptations and conjuring up wonderful female villains? Rose The Hat as played by Ferguson is far more sinister and vile than her book counterpart. Every moment she’s on screen you fear that she might do something dastardly; even when she’s speaking to her lover (even though I doubt this character can love) Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon).

But this is the strength of movie adaptations. Good movies allow actors to become their characters, to live them. Mike Flanagan understands this perfectly well in Dr. Sleep (not so much in The haunting of Hill House (2018)).

By focussing just a handful of scenes on the newest  ‘True knot’-troupe member Snakebite Andi (Emily Alyn Lind) and her interacting with the others the actors gain the momentum to become real humans even though their core characters are supernatural and single-minded –thus, prone to two dimensionality.

As always it is fun to see the wonderful Carel Struycken in a genre piece again.

He really is Hollywood’s go-to strange man (this is a compliment).

BTW it is hinted at quite strongly in the movie that his Grandpa Flick character is a Strigoi.

Left on Flanagan’s table are the shots/scenes he wants to pull for this movie. Sometimes he pulls the camera back and lets the wide-open shots overtake the screen for a fantasy-element (like Rose the Hat looking for Ebra, or the tilting room scene). Whereas, when true bloody horror is needed, he closes in on the victim and his/her torment.

And yes the horror in this movie is as brutal as the opening scene of IT: Chapter one (2017).

It’s a polite (textbook) playing with the camera that is never distracting or overtly artistic. It is only when the big finale comes to show that Flanagan can no longer control himself.

By the way, the Overlook hotel didn’t get destroyed in Kubrick’s The Shining. So in Dr. Sleep the finale takes place at the  boarded up –but intact- Overlook.

The Shining greatest hits.

If you love The Shining as dearly as I do (and many, many, people with me) you can consider yourself very lucky. In the span of two years we got to see The Overlook hotel recreated not once, but twice for our pleasure. First in Ready Player One (2018) and second in this movie Dr. Sleep.

Comparing ´The Shining´-scene in Spielberg’s Sci-fi spectacle to Dr. Sleep’s finale one thing becomes obvious. There is a lot less CGI tomfoolery in Flanagan’s hotel. This is absolutely a plus. I applaud Spielberg for the wonderful visual eye he has but the last ten years or so he relied far too much on CGI when it wasn’t really needed.

Intermezzo This reliance on CGI is a tricky one for me because I sometimes applaud it (e.g. recreating the ‘70s skyline in David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007)) and sometimes I just don’t see the point. For instance: I never quite understood David Fincher digitally cloning an actor’s face over another actor to create twins in The social network (2010). Why not hire...I don’t know...real twins? Like Linda Hamilton’s sister for that wonderful deleted scene from Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). Fun fact: Ewan McGregor once got himself ‘cloned’ over another actor (a lot less technical than the ‘Fincher technique’) in Last days in the desert (2015). But, then again, in that movie he was playing both Jesus Christ of Nazareth and Satan. Same father and all. So on some kind of artistic level it isn’t much of a stretch to cast the same actor for both parts (like George Burns famously did in Oh, God! You Devil (1984) as both God and the Devil). CGI can do anything...but should it? Naturally this CGI discussion is currently also being held on related subjects as ‘de-aging’ actors as Scorsese did for The Irishman (2019). The question here being, of course, how much de-aging can a person put in a movie. Should it be a little bit for a flashback or two (e.g. Ant-man (2015)) or is it allowed for the entire movie? The second subject is the current morality debate going on about resurrecting actors (e.g. Star Wars: rogue one (2016)). Would Peter Cushing have reprised his role if he was still alive (immortal)? If he refused would the studio honour his wish? In this sense I consider it refreshing that Flanagan decided against ‘recreating’ Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers or even Danny Lloyd. The movie doesn’t need that. And the audience is more than happy to accept these new actors in the parts. But this does bring forth a nice dilemma. Because the recreated 2019 Overlook hotel in Dr Sleep  is –visually- one hundred percent the same as the 1981 original. So now we’ve got ‘new faces’ running around in a familiar set. The reason for this I’ll explain after this intermezzo. Sufficient to say here is that because the finale of Dr. Sleep uses so many visual elements from the original The Shining movie the actors actually feel ‘wrong’ or ‘out of place’ almost in the same way those deepfake face-swaps of famous, well known, movie scenes feel wrong.

But, then I do give Spielberg credit for ‘playing around’-for want of a better word- with Kubrick’s classic. The ‘The Shining-scene’ works marvellously in Ready Player One because the movie is filled to the brim with pop-culture references. And it’s not like Spielberg is blatantly making an exact copy of the original movie. He inserts a completely bonkers storyline with out-of-tune characters. Only the backdrop of the haunted hotel is the same the rest is refreshingly new.

This is where Flanagan fails in his big finale for Dr. Sleep: he recreates too much! I was in awe the moment Danny Torrance re-entered the hotel of his childhood fears. The place looked exactly the same. But then what does Flanagan do? He painstakingly recreates various shots and moments from the original.

I did enjoy the ‘doctor’s office’-scene earlier in the movie (with the great Bruce Greenwood,

another King-movie alumni) since it is the same (incorrectly placed) office as it is in The Shining.

If only Flanagan stayed with these little pokes of fun here and there.

He doesn’t show us a new part of the hotel; a spot Kubrick’s movie has never been (like the attic).

No, he lets Dan(ny) take a tour to see all the highlights (The gold room, room 237, the Redrum-door, the elevators, the staircase, the maze. Only the kitchen and the red bathroom are missing). And at each of these locations he uses the exact same shots as Kubrick’s version.

He relies on this so much so that when the movie misses a beat (e.g. Danny riding his tricycle through the hall –‘new’ Danny has a different riding technique than ‘old’ Danny, apparently) it actually registers –to me- as a faux pas. It takes me out of the scene because I’m unwittingly (and unwillingly) comparing the shots.

I’m left to wonder why I was put in this position in the first place? I can understand the fun of recreating a shot or two (like the drive-up to The Overlook) as both an in-joke and a homage. But after that the movie really should have started to create its own shots. There are more than one way to shoot a stair-scene.

And that’s just the camera-angle and the montage I’m talking about here. The finale also recreates choreography, dialogue and, apparently, only the original movie’s amount of ghosts.

If there’s one movie in which Flanagan could’ve used his, now famous, ‘ghosts lurking in the shadows’-trick

that he pulled before in The haunting of Hill House it would’ve been this movie.

According to the first book there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of souls at The Overlook.

This is a shame since Dr. Sleep started so well with focussing on the Stephen King/book-lore instead of the Kubrick-lore.

Back at the Overlook hotel.

What to make of Dr. Sleep? The first three quarters of the movie are a faithful Stephen King adaptation that understands the source material. There’s some great acting to be found in this movie. Especially Ferguson is a scene stealer. But, then again, every actor fits his/her respective part perfectly with great chemistry between actors on screen.

The streamlined plot then, works a charm with very little unnecessary moments. Which, for what is basically a road-movie, is quite a feat as those movies have a tendency to meander all over the place.

Then there are the various visual tricks the movie pulls that are always greatly imaginative. Even in the scenes where the movie runs the risk over overdoing itself it reels itself back in just in time and lets suggestion take centre stage. Dr. Sleep (for the first three quarters of the movie) knows what kind of story it is telling. It’s telling a Stephen King story.

But then, for the great finale, the movie shifts gear and goes into blatant Kubrick territory. Suddenly the movie needs to tie itself to the cinematic masterpiece (that won two razzies in) of 1981 instead of the book. It is this heavy-handed connecting with the original in the final act that doesn’t sit well with me. A more loose approach would’ve been appreciated.

Still, for any The Shining fan Dr. Sleep is a must see movie. But, in my mind, it is best to see it as one of the better book adaptation of the original author than something that comes even close to the vision of that ‘other’ author.