By Brett Blake DOCTOR SLEEP is a quite engrossing... but also odd and awkward... adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to THE SHINING. It’s a fascinating movie in the sense that all the individual pieces, choices, and performances are thoroughly compelling, and it tells its story with confident filmmaking, but it is also operating in the shadow of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of THE SHINING, which this movie embraces, but which also results in something that feels extremely uneasy. It’s worth saying right here -- because much of the rest of my time will be spent digging into why the movie feels so strange -- that I think DOCTOR SLEEP is a quite good film. It’s very well-staged by director Mike Flanagan, and his screenplay adaptation of King’s novel captures the sensitive and introspective qualities of this story of adult Dan Torrance dealing with the trauma that his experiences during THE SHINING inflicted upon him. Ewan McGregor is equal to the task of performing the role, and he manages to convey Dan’s internalized conflicts very well. As the pivotal character of Abra Stone, a young girl who can also Shine like Dan, Kyliegh Curran is extremely sympathetic, getting across with ease the sense that this girl is precociously curious about her abilities, perhaps a bit reckless, and also contains an untapped well of internal strength. The performance of the movie, however, belongs to Rebecca Ferguson as the villainous Rose the Hat, the leader of a group of psychic vampires who prey on those with the ability to Shine, which sets them on the trail of Abra and Dan. Rather than purely chewing scenery (though there’s a bit of that), Ferguson makes Rose feel like a complete character, not just a collection of “bad gal” tropes wrapped up in one tidy and convenient package. We can tell she’s having fun in the part, but she plays the character’s menace completely straight, and she makes this character probably the best villain in any movie this year. So all of that is good-to-great stuff. But here’s where things get strange, though not necessarily in an objectively bad way -- DOCTOR SLEEP is not scary. There are a couple of moments that are shocking, and its general atmosphere is strong, but it in no way offers the overpowering dread that THE SHINING does. I would expect that people who walk into this movie with no knowledge of its source book may walk out kind of perplexed by what they’ve just witnessed. Yes, it deals with the supernatural, and yes, great acts of evil are depicted, but on a tonal level, this is much more introspective and cerebral than it is genuinely spooky. It’s a character study dressed-up in horror trappings, ultimately more concerned with the emotional stories of Dan and Abra than it is in unnerving the audience to any great degree. It’s cashing-in on the iconography of one of horror cinema’s towering achievements... yet it is pretty uninterested in even trying to replicate the intensity of the frightening mood with which Kubrick’s THE SHINING is infused. And in that sense, it’s very faithful to the book, so credit to Flanagan. But in attempting to meld Kubrick’s THE SHINING with King’s DOCTOR SLEEP novel (which approach things from radically different angles and intentions), we are left with something of an uneasy balancing act. In a vacuum, the finale -- which returns us to the sinister Overlook Hotel from Kubrick’s film -- does provide a more satisfying and cinematic conclusion than the conclusion of King’s novel (which, essentially, takes place on a vacant lot in the Rockies), but when you really look at it through the lens of the movie trying to thread the needle and serve multiple masters, it feels awkward. Technically well-executed and visually interesting, sure, but somehow jarring and out-of-place. At the end of the day, I think this film proves that it is not possible to make something that is both a faithful sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING and a faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s DOCTOR SLEEP. Kubrick’s vision of THE SHINING's story remains too different from King’s own, so for Flanagan to attempt to wrap them both together here and hopefully arrive at some kind of fusion is valiant and admirable, but -- ultimately -- kind of ineffective. The movie is never not compelling, however, and devoted fans of the novel will likely find a great deal in here to be pleased about. Its intentions are very much coming from a good place, and that does count for something.
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