While I was waiting to be let into the theater for this movie, the woman sitting next to me opened a newspaper and there was a full-page review of Doctor Sleep, a negative one, and I thought, Oh great. I was already walking in with bad expectations—the trailer for this movie doesn’t do it any favors. It felt a bit like, LOVE THE LITTLE MERMAID? GUESS WHAT WE MADE THE LITTLE MERMAID 2!! Included were some reshots of iconic parts of The Shining, which only pointed out the impossible task set up by making a sequel to The Shining: how do you follow up on a Kubrick film that is one of the most classic horror movies out there? A movie beloved by pretty much everyone (excepting Stephen King himself). Add to that that the villain appeared to be a hot, female version of Slash from Guns N Roses—I didn’t really think the movie would be any good, but found that over time, the movie kept winning me over.
When Doctor Sleep the novel came out, I had the same reaction—did we really need a sequel to The Shining? But several people insisted, no, it’s good, it’s actually very much about alcoholism. (I never read the book—my reading of horror trickled to almost nothing since the 2000s—the alcoholism thing was a hard sell for me). But what I admired about this movie is not just that it’s well plotted, that the shotguns that are hung over the mantel do in fact satisfyingly go off, but also that it did interrogate some interesting thematic content that a lot of horror movies are lacking.
Well let me first say this, I’m not sure Doctor Sleep is actually a horror movie. It’s not scary—maybe the last act is a little, and there’ s a scene of a kid getting killed that’s a bit intense, but the overall feel of the movie was something more like dark fantasy. During my initial negative feelings of the movie, you see this cold opening that is similar to It. A little girl off on her own encounters Rose the Hat, who seems to want to be friends/ eat her. The thing is, Pennywise is scary, even when he’s being friendly—Rose the Hat just isn’t. What is up, I thought, with a villain with an occasional Irish accent and a black hat and a band of random carnies. Rose isn’t really the villain of the movie though.
We grow to learn that Danny Torrance, after surviving the events at the Overlook Hotel, has not surprisingly been traumatized by those events. Drinking blunts both the trauma and tamps down his shining. He moves to a new town where he befriends a man literally named Bill who gets him a job, a room for rent, and an introduction to AA. (If you’re not familiar, AA was founded by a man named Bill W and AA attendees sometimes refer to themselves as “Friends of Bill W.”) Dan forms a cute pen pan relationship with another person with the shining—this turns out to be Abra, a kid living a thousand miles away (played very effectively by Kyliegh Curran—in particular during the eye-changing scene).
Rose and her band of merry assholes are basically psychic vampires who have been hunting kids to “eat”—this is never really as scary as Pennywise, but ultimately I was fine with this. Where I started to really like this movie is when it took turns I wasn’t necessarily expecting. And if you’ve consumed a lot of Stephen King, you can definitely feel the Stephen King in it. When things really start going to shit—Rose detects Abra’s existence and is out to get her, prompting Dan and Abra to finally meet—I was surprised to see Dan and Abra decide to tell Abra’s father everything (casting aside the often tiresome trope of “we can’t tell anyone for reasons/or they’ll think we’re crazy!”) Dan also tells Billy the whole deal—Billy who is basically the most solid, bestest friend you could ever ask for—and the two embark on a mission together. I loved these scenes of them together and was super sad to (SPOILER) see Billy get killed. But it never felt like Dick Hallorann’s death in Kubrick’s Shining (who basically shows up to get killed so that Danny and his mom can have a giant snowmobile to get out of Dodge.) It felt really appropriate—when things get really bad, Dan doesn’t have a sponsor who is always going to be there. Really, really bad things are going to happen, and he’s going to have to get through it on his own.
Particularly after recently rewatching the new version of It and its second chapter, it was satisfying to see a psychic battle between Abra and Rose visually depicted in a way that made sense. Not only did it make sense, but it was both visually interesting and tense. (One of the significant failures of It Chapter Two was its inability to depict the whole Ritual of Chud in any way that made sense— it just didn’t translate well from the novel, and ultimately felt a little ridiculous). Not so here—Abra and Rose have a confrontation that I think in lesser hands would not have worked.
A really satisfying element of this movie was Abra herself. Most often, horror movies have children for the sole purpose of being innocent victims of potential violence—the stakes are raised just based on our fear of bad things happening to small humans. I found myself very satisfied with a character like Abra: she’s incredibly psychically strong and knows it, maybe even revels in it. She’s not hapless—she’s agentic and an active partner in moving the plot forward. I got the impression that she was actually stronger than Rose, but this was never done in a way that didn’t make you lose a sense of stakes.
This movie, unlike what the trailer may imply, is not a rehashing of Kubrick’s Shining, relying on the same old elements for cheap scares. There are hints of music and occasional shots, but the director (Mike Flanagan, who directed an episode of The Haunting of Hill House—which I loved—in addition to Hush, another solid horror movie) was pointedly not making The Shining 2—which was the only way to make this movie successfully, I think. Despite the fact that the trailer is filled with familiar images (the blood getting off the elevator, the creepy twins), that’s not at all what this movie is. It’s a movie in its own right.
But yes, there is a part where you go back to the Overlook Hotel—and this is not done cheaply—the storytelling earns it. (This is the only point in the movie where they go all in on musical callbacks to The Shining—and because the movie earned it, I found myself smiling. It also earns the long, overhead shots of the windy drive up to the hotel—this time in winter rather than the summer opening of the first movie.) Dan is fucked up because of everything he’s seen, and he has spent years trying to avoid that trauma by drinking. For supernatural reasons, it makes sense for the final confrontation of Dan + Abra vs Rose to take place at The Overlook: Dan knows it to be a place where hungry entities await their next meal. The hotel itself is very powerful—perhaps more powerful than all of them. But going back to the hotel provides the most satisfying moments of the movie because Dan is finally going back to confront the trauma he never did previously. After turning various valves in the boiler room (a nod to the novel—a key element left out of Kubrick’s version), he wanders the rotting hotel, finally coming to an oddly immaculate ballroom in a recreation of the above scene. Dan really wants a drink. Floyd the bartending ghost is only happy to provide one. We don’t see Floyd at first, but Dan immediately addresses him as if he is Jack Torrance. Finally, decades after his father’s death, he confronts his father not just about his own trauma, but about Jack’s trauma. And much like how Dan’s “Floyd” is Jack, who is Jack’s “Floyd”?
The novel The Shining is far more about alcoholism than the original movie version (let’s just set aside the TV remake, starring the guy from Wings, which, while more faithful, starred the guy from Wings.) Stephen King is often writing about his own addiction issues, and was often writing while actively being addicted, and Doctor Sleep might be the closest thing to being directly about his own monsters. (Rose literally survives as a semi-immortal being by consuming something that you have to kill others to get—when she consumes it, her wounds are healed, and she can live a bit longer). I think if others don’t like this movie, it might be because they wanted more horror elements, or The Shining 2, or maybe they object to the down-home sensibilities of King’s storytelling—but for those of us who like him, this style of storytelling is something familiar while also sometimes being surprising and satisfying.