“Eat well, live long.” - Rose The Hat
Doctor Sleep is the new film by Mike Flanagan, and serves as a direct sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, The Shining. Ewan McGregor stars as Danny Torrance, who is now all grown up. His Shine has become more powerful, and he now uses his special gift to help people who need it, but not always in ways that you might expect. Elsewhere, the True Knot cult, led by a woman named Rose the Hat, is hunting and killing people who have the ability to Shine. They are on the trail of pursuing a young girl named Abra, who just so happens to be one of the most powerful people to ever have possessed the gift of Shining. Abra eventually crosses paths with Danny, who now goes by just “Dan”, and this leads to some very interesting situations.
If you guys read my review of The Shining, you know that it’s my favorite horror film of all time, and that I consider it a masterpiece. So naturally, my anticipation for Doctor Sleep was through the roof, and I have to say this movie totally lived up to my excitement. This film is tremendous. It’s everything you would want in a sequel to The Shining, but it’s also everything you didn’t know you wanted in a sequel to The Shining. It delivered in every aspect I expected it to, and it shows yet again that Mike Flanagan knows exactly what he’s doing behind the camera.
The direction here is magnificent, and so is the cinematography. I loved the use of specific shot structures from The Shining that were recreated in this film. The sweeping camera movements were so graceful, and quite beautiful to look at, and I felt that a great amount of tension in the film was due to the way the camera captured certain scenes. The editing is also great, and I loved the way that dissolves were used as scene transitions, which was another technique used in The Shining. The score was beautiful, and borrowed elements from the score of The Shining, and the music at the end credits was exactly the same as the music in the end credits of the original film, which I thought was brilliant.
The acting is extremely impressive, especially on the part of Ewan McGregor, and Kyliegh Curran, who played Abra. Rebecca Ferguson is also fantastic as Rose the Hat, one of the most compelling movie villains of this year. I love how Mike Flanagan brought back Carel Struycken and Bruce Greenwood, who were both in Flanagan’s first Stephen King adaptation, Gerald’s Game, and I found it really cool that Jacob Tremblay has a role in the film as well. Another fact I find worth noting is that Danny Lloyd, the actor who originally played Danny Torrance in The Shining has a cameo in this film.
Probably my favorite aspect of Doctor Sleep is the fact that the film stays true to its roots while also building a whole new story with new characters, new locations, and new themes. The Shining is a contained thriller with supernatural elements thrown in for good measure, while Doctor Sleep on the other hand focuses purely on those supernatural elements. A main point that is heavily explored in the film is what the Shining actually is, and to what extent people can use its powers. I found all of the trippy cerebral elements to be very fascinating, and was absolutely stunned to see the mind games that characters could play by using their Shine.
I only have one small issue with the film. There were a couple of very small scenes that could’ve been cut out, and even though the removal of said scenes would probably save no more than five minutes, I still thought that they should’ve been removed. I don’t think that the movie was too long, I just think that those few scenes were not very necessary to the plot.
All in all, I consider Doctor Sleep to be an absolutely impeccable film, and a more than worthy sequel to an all time classic piece of cinema. This movie shows that if they are done right, and treated with great care, fantastic sequels are possible.
Rating: R
Grade: A
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