Doctor Sleep

3/4's of the way through Doctor Sleep a teenager drops their mobile phone out of the window of a moving car. A teenager. Their phone. The most important thing in their life. The device tied to every aspect of their being. When they willingly do that you know things are about to get serious. In Doctor Sleep, written by Stephen King and directed by Mike Flanagan, everything is life or death.

In 1980 a young boy with psychic powers called Danny Torrance survived an attempt on his life but it left him with serious emotional scars. Those scars led to alcoholism and 31 years later after one particularly heavy night and it's low aftermath he (Ewan McGregor) decides it's time to clean himself up. Finding himself in a small north eastern town he takes a janitorial position in a hospice and he uses his powers, his shining, to ease the suffering of the patients within. At the same time a travelling gang called the True Knot, led by a woman called Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), is hunting and killing people with the shining so they can feed off their powers. Their horrifying behaviour is psychically discovered by a powerful young girl called Abra (Kyliegh Curran in a fine debut) who soon finds herself in danger. Can Danny overcome a lifetime of trauma to help her?

Doctor Sleep is a sequel to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. A film generally considered to be one of the scariest films of all time. It takes serious balls to make a sequel to a film like that but happily Doctor Sleep is up to the task. Mostly. It's a considered, atmospheric, beautiful looking and surprisingly warm look at the damage, physically and psychologically, violence can have on a person's psyche and how those people yearn to give back, to be whole again. Danny, now Dan, is a broken man, using whiskey and class A's to block out his past and when he gets a chance to make something of himself he grabs it with both hands. This earlier part of the film was my favourite, full of empathy and it sees Ewan McGregor at his best but ya know this is a horror film, and bad things must happen.

And my god do they. The True Knot are a nasty bunch of bastards and Rebecca Ferguson's Rose The Hat is one seriously warped individual as we see in a truly disturbing murder scene. It's the stuff of nightmares but thankfully director Mike Flanagan plays it off the reactions of attacker and victim instead of revelling in the gore of the situation. He knows when to hold back, especially in the earlier part of the film before letting loose later. The Shining was a supernatural tale but Doctor Sleep really leans into that side of things. Flying, glowing, evaporating, ripping, tearing, screaming, all that good stuff. Fans of the earlier film may roll their eyes at the silliness but for me it worked and it's pleasing that this sequel isn't just a cheap retread of the earlier film.

That is, until it is and it's here the movie stops being it's own beast and falls into fan service mode (an earlier scene in a doctors office is a straight up wink at the camera). It feels forced and there's way too many nods towards the original film that may make you roll your eyes but thankfully the film and it's three leads create such goodwill in the earlier stages that it makes the ending easier to swallow. If you haven't seen the original BTW, you might have a hard time with this. There's a lot of story going on with very little explanation for the newbies. If you have seen the original you'll like that fact that this time the story is far more humane and less detached emotionally as Kubrick's films tended to be. The Shining's opening scenes floated above the countryside, away from it's characters. Doctor Sleep's start above but zoom in fast. There's instantly more interest in the characters and it's why for me Doctor Sleep succeeds as a horror.

This is worth a watch. It's a well made and very well acted movie. It's always nice when a belated sequel doesn't tarnish an original. The old days when a Stephen King adaption was a guaranteed stinker are well over. Now the talent and effort his work deserves is poured on and we, the audience, get to lap it up.

In cinemas everywhere from today.