Doc­tor Sleep

Let’s call it the bat­tle of the SKs. In 1977, Stephen King pub­lish­es his best-sell­ing nov­el ​‘The Shin­ing’, trans­lat­ing into the alle­gor­i­cal lan­guage of hor­ror fic­tion the toll that his own alco­holism was tak­ing on his pro­fes­sion­al and domes­tic lives.

Then in 1980, Stan­ley Kubrick turns that nov­el into a seri­ous con­tender for the great­est hor­ror film ever made (cer­tain­ly one of the most icon­ic), while tak­ing all man­ner of lib­er­ties with the source mate­r­i­al, not least among which is his deci­sion to have head chef Dick Hal­lo­rann sum­mar­i­ly killed by Jack Tor­rance with­in moments of return­ing to the Over­look Hotel, even though in the book he sur­vives to help Jack’s wife Wendy and their lit­tle son Dan get away. Audi­ences love the film, but King famous­ly (and out­spo­ken­ly) hates it.

Four­teen years after Kubrick’s death, King pub­lished a sequel, ​‘Doc­tor Sleep’, in 2013. With it, he was not just reex­am­in­ing his drunk­en past from a posi­tion of sobri­ety, but also reap­pro­pri­at­ing a nar­ra­tive that he had in part lost to cin­e­ma, even if many read­ers, as they look at those new words on the page, will still have Kubrick’s strange, not quite sym­met­ri­cal images play­ing indeli­bly in their minds.

In bring­ing this sequel to the big screen, writer/​director Mike Flana­gan has had to serve as medi­um between the liv­ing and the dead, find­ing a way to hon­our both King’s book(s) and Kubrick’s influ­en­tial film. That the hor­ror nov­el­ist and the Kubrick estate have both giv­en their approval to the fin­ished prod­uct is some tes­ti­mo­ny to Flanagan’s suc­cess in nego­ti­at­ing a path between two pre­vi­ous­ly irrec­on­cil­able cre­ative standpoints.

In fact much of Doc­tor Sleep is con­cerned pre­cise­ly with tricky com­mu­ni­ca­tion across space and time. Now in his for­ties, and still trau­ma­tised by his expe­ri­ences decades ear­li­er at the Over­look, Dan (Ewan McGre­gor) has long been sup­press­ing his para­nor­mal pow­ers – or ​‘shin­ing’ – through alco­hol abuse. In oth­er words, this is an adult still in close con­tact with his child­hood, even if, in seek­ing to escape who he real­ly is, he is iron­i­cal­ly becom­ing just like the father he so fears. Yet like King him­self, Dan man­ages to break the cycle. Wash­ing up in Fra­zier, New Hamp­shire, Dan com­mits to an AA programme.

With his long dulled shine now reawak­en­ing, Dan takes a job in a hos­pice where he helps guide dying patients to the oth­er side, earn­ing him­self the nick­name ​‘Doc­tor Sleep’. He also finds him­self engag­ing in reg­u­lar long-dis­tance con­ver­sa­tions with young shin­er Abra Stone (impres­sive new­com­er Kyliegh Cur­ran), who com­mu­ni­cates with him via mes­sages writ­ten in chalk on the wall of his rent­ed attic room (a reminder of the writ­ten word’s cen­tral­i­ty in this mythos).

The pow­er­ful Abra has also attract­ed the atten­tion of the True Knot, a cult-like col­lec­tive led by Rose the Hat (Rebec­ca Fer­gu­son) who main­tain their own unnat­ur­al longevi­ty by feed­ing on the fear and pain of young shin­ers. In help­ing Abra con­front this relent­less crew of child mur­der­ers (each with their own shine-like pow­ers), Dan must also return to the source of all his own damage.

The very idea of an adult hav­ing to return to the scene of child­hood trau­ma and face his own demons is famil­iar from 2019’s oth­er big King adap­ta­tion, Andy Muschietti’s It Chap­ter Two. Except that Flana­gan, who has past form with tales of trau­ma (Absen­tia, Ocu­lus, Oui­ja: Ori­gin of Evil, TV’s The Haunt­ing of Hill House), proves far more adept at flesh­ing out real, cred­i­ble char­ac­ters, while Rose is a much more inter­est­ing and slip­pery vil­lain (with all too recog­nis­ably human motives) than the car­toon­ish Pen­ny­wise ever was.

Flana­gan is also no stranger to adapt­ing King, hav­ing made Gerald’s Game for Net­flix in 2017, whose shock­ing scene of a ​‘deglov­ing’ injury makes a wince-induc­ing return here. Most­ly, though, Doc­tor Sleep has the feel of a ​‘mutants assem­ble’ film, recall­ing the X‑Men fran­chise and espe­cial­ly Paul McGuigan’s Push – there is even one char­ac­ter here (Emi­ly Alyn Lind) whose pow­ers see her referred to as a ​‘push­er’, while all sides play mind-bend­ing tricks on each oth­er in a bat­tle for survival.

Flana­gan weaves flu­id­ly between the sep­a­rate worlds of King and Kubrick in much the way that Dan medi­ates between the liv­ing and the dead. To main­tain con­ti­nu­ity with the film The Shin­ing, for exam­ple, Dick Hal­lo­rann is indeed deceased here. But Hal­lo­rann (played by Carl Lumbly) nonethe­less reg­u­lar­ly vis­its Dan as a revenant to pro­vide moral guid­ance and top shin­ing tips, and so can con­tin­ue, in keep­ing with King’s nov­els, to serve as Dan’s men­tor and father fig­ure – which, in a pass­ing of the gen­er­a­tional baton, Dan will him­self become for Abra. Hallorann’s ghost­ly return is a well-inte­grat­ed com­pro­mise that allows for a mov­ing pay-off in the film’s final scenes.

Flana­gan also finds a way to return to the Over­look – burnt down at the end of King’s nov­el, but intact at the end of Kubrick’s film – here beau­ti­ful­ly recon­struct­ed not just as a haunt­ed house but also as an echo cham­ber con­jur­ing a famil­iar cin­e­mat­ic past. Yet in retread­ing that hal­lowed ground, Flana­gan restores scenes and ideas from King’s orig­i­nal book that were aban­doned in Kubrick’s film, and so con­jures a spir­it of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and bridges an impos­si­ble gap between dif­fer­ent fic­tive dimen­sions, before final­ly lay­ing every­thing to rest (and look­ing for­ward to new directions).

And so, much as the ter­ri­fy­ing Grady girls – express­ly not twins in The Shin­ing but nonethe­less uncan­ni­ly played by actu­al twins – are list­ed in this sequel’s cred­its sim­ply as ​‘the Grady twins’, Doc­tor Sleep final­ly locates that com­mon space where the two diver­gent SKs can merge into one. It’s no The Shin­ing, but maybe that is just anoth­er way of say­ing that it is some­thing dif­fer­ent. After all, once we have con­front­ed our unre­solved feel­ings about the past, we all, like Dan, need to move on. This fine­ly-craft­ed, often affect­ing film points not nec­es­sar­i­ly to anoth­er sequel, but to a future where the Over­look and its eerie occu­pants have been frozen in time and locked away, for­ev­er and ever and ever…