Doctor Sleep

Minor spoilers throughout

Now of course we didn’t really need a sequel to The Shining but a story that takes place in the same universe with some of the same characters could be something.  As long as we’re not going over the same ground I’m open to it so I checked out Doc Sleep.  Let’s catch up with Danny Torrance forty years later.

Well Danny (Ewan McGregor (The Ghost Writer)) became a homeless alcoholic.  His father trying to kill him and his mother and that bizarre ghost shit fucked him up a real bad.  He gets into fights, carouses around and has lost his moral compass.  But eventually he takes hold of his own destiny, joins AA and sobers up.  He suggests this is the route his father would’ve taken if he hadn’t you know, chased after his family with an ax and attempted to chop them into little bits.  Hey, it was the Overlook Hotel ghosts that made him do it.  Jack was an innocent bystander.  Could’ve happened to anyone.  Anyway, it’s good to see Danny sorting his shit out.

Meanwhile there are these humanoid creature/spirit thingies roaming the country feeding off human fear and anguish.  They inhale the emitted vapor of a victim like taking a hit of a drug.  So they’re more or less vampires.  They can live for thousands of years, must consume this specific part of a human being to stay healthy, can turn anyone into whatever type of species they are, can perform some mind tricks on others and etc.  They can be killed by conventional means however which is a bit of a drawback but fair.

Additionally there’s Abra (Kyleigh Curran (I Can I Will I Did)), a young teenage girl who starts a conversation with Danny across the state of New Hampshire via shining.  I guess she sends these messages out there and waits for someone who also has the shine to respond.  She’s more powerful than Danny though and just about everyone else in the movie including the villains.  She can get inside anyone’s head, rummage around in their memory bank (or library as they say), mutilate them in their mind so that it manifests physically in reality and she can get inside multiple people’s brains and alter what they see in the real world.  So she’s pretty god-like.

And this is part of the problem with the film.  It makes up the rules as it goes with any character’s abilities.  The boundaries aren’t clear for Abra’s super powers which goes beyond simple shining.  If you can Jedi mind trick people and make them have visions and kill them at will then that’s on a completely different level than talking to someone else without opening your mouth.

It’s the same deal with the villains too.  The implication is that each of the eight have a unique power except we only learn of three of them.  And even then we don’t know their extent.  It’s all vague shit.

To back up a sec there are definitely some good, or at least passable, ideas in here which I’d like to emphasize.  Danny’s arc is refreshing, him giving some comfort and company to those about to die is really sweet (which is how he gets the nickname Doctor Sleep), the relationship between Danny and Abra is well constructed and the bad guys are quite menacing especially given that they tend to target very young children.  They don’t shy away from this aspect either by including a graphic child murder scene that’s disturbing as fuck.

But inconsistent screenwriting squashes everything like the final showdown takes place at the Overlook Hotel for absolutely no reason, Danny inexplicably knows or guesses correctly about who the villains are and their weaknesses, the magic powers suddenly available in any situation is convenient as all hell and the dialogue is mostly terrible with a zillion clichés like “it’s too dangerous”, “what have you done?”, “I can’t hold it off for much longer” and all that kinda shit.

The fan service is bad as well.  You got the aforementioned Overlook Hotel, the “come play with us” twins, “great party” guy, little Danny riding on his tricycle, redrum, one character’s office is exactly the same as the manager’s from the Overlook, Wendy still wears the same blue bathrobe from the first film, a hedge maze foot pursuit and lots of others.

They also didn’t setup this Rose the Hat villain (Rebecca Ferguson (The Girl on the Train)) quite right because she’s supposed to be so powerful that Danny and Abra can’t defeat her by themselves but this dynamic is never established.  In fact at one point about midway Abra kicks Rose’s ass by mentally slamming her hand in a file cabinet and infiltrating her vast memory library.  This is a great scene because it’s unexpected and makes the villain look vulnerable, but not totally weak in the way it’s staged, which we almost never see in these types of movies.

My favorite scene though is probably the one between Danny and his father.  Jack is trying to get him back on the booze and the emotions and intensity keep building as Danny refuses but Jack insistently pushes the glass back towards him.  This of course mirrors a scene in The Shining with Jack and Lloyd the bartender.  And I know liking this part is hypocritical based on what I said earlier.

The movie starts off wanting to be its own thing but then devolves into a much worse version of its predecessor with so many recreated shots, scenes and made up junk.  It’s so frustrating because they had enough decent material where they didn’t need to resort to all the callbacks.  Plus with some tweaks to remove all the tired tropes and some tightening up this could’ve been better.