Dick teaches him to build in his head, and is living a quiet and solitary life in rural New Hampshire when a powerful teenaged telepath named Abra (Kyliegh Curran) makes contact via the blackboard painted on Danny’s attic-apartment wall. Luckily, Danny’s fellow “shiner,” the late Dick Halloran (Carl Lumbly), has also stuck around in Danny’s head, appearing at opportune times to advise him on how best to use the shining-not unlike a well-known sci-fi surrogate father McGregor himself has played.ĭanny has his drinking in check and his multiple demons more or less battened up in metaphorical mind-boxes. Because of Danny’s telepathic gift (the titular “Shining”), the ghosts in his mind don’t manifest themselves physically, but they’re something more than mere memories, presenting both emotional and bodily danger. In the wake of the supernatural events of The Shining, Danny Torrence (Ewan McGregor) suffered through decades of trauma and hard living, pursued by the undead guests of the Overlook Hotel who’ve taken up residence in his psyche. It’s probably to Doctor Sleep’s credit that it departs from its four-decade-old precedent in narrative and tone, but the new film’s repeated, overt references to a very different film give it a wobbly feeling, as if it’s teetering back and forth between King’s vision and Kubrick’s. Flanagan’s film maintains King’s penchant for epic structure while repeatedly evoking Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror, from multiple callbacks to the earlier film’s iconic helicopter shot following a car headed toward doom, to appropriations of its methodically slow lap dissolves, to a brief and throwaway recapitulation of the original’s subtly unnerving job-interview scene, to the inevitable return to the Overlook Hotel.
That writer-director Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Doctor Sleep is also a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining-notoriously despised by King, principally for its un-redemptive finale-makes for an awkward combination. As styled by King, such stories may on occasion provoke terror, but redemption and retributive justice are their true structuring emotions. In a narrative framework familiar from novels like It and The Stand, an evil, ethereal force can only be stopped by a surrogate family who can marshal those same forces for good, after a difficult journey and an episodic vanquishing of obstacles that hones their skills and resolve. Like many Stephen King stories, Doctor Sleep, the author’s belated sequel to his 1977 classic The Shining, isn’t so much a work of straight horror as it is an epic fantasy suffused with elements of the horrific.
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