Doctor Sleep

Mike Flanagan – 2019 – USA

Thanks to the fact that this film didn’t do as much business as the other adaptations of Stephen King books from last year, It and Pet Sematary, even though they sucked, the studios aren’t likely to greenlight many more perfectly intelligent and rewarding types of films like Doctor Sleep. Mike Flanagan, (who was also behind Netflix’s excellent The Haunting of Hill House), avoids the mistake commonly made by would-be translators of King novels to cinema. They either slavishly transcribe everything whether it works on film or not, or they make changes according to producers’ whims rather than make sense for the intent of the stories. Like Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick before him, (and no, I’m not saying he’s in their league), Flanagan took ownership of the material and took the liberties necessary to make the resulting film not only consistent with his own concerns as an artist but homogenous with the themes of the original work too. Set nearly thirty years after the events in The Shining, the film picks up little Danny Torrance’s life in adulthood. Having dealt with severe alcoholism, just like his father, partly as a means of suppressing his psychic gifts, Dan hits rock bottom and summons the strength to seek recovery. Taking a job in a hospice facility, he uses his abilities to bring comfort to elderly patients who are about to die. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the film, with Dan introduced as a remarkably likeable and heroic protagonist, aided in no small part by the sensitive and low-key performance by Ewan McGregor. Meanwhile, a cult of psychic-vampires is roaming the land looking to feast on those, like Dan, with the “shining” trait. What makes the film special, furthermore, is that Flanagan endeavored, and succeeded, in reconciling three distinct entities; Stephen King’s novel The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s film, and King’s Doctor Sleep. Flanagan’s film is a fourth entity that manages to blend several (seemingly conflicting) agendas without losing a bit of coherence or dramatic momentum. I wouldn’t say it’s a “great” film, necessarily, but it blatantly stands out among recent mainstream horror films thanks to its confident air, its maturity and especially its refusal to utilize jump scares and other tropes that make a lot of current horror so boring. As writer, director and editor of his own films, Mike Flanagan is a real auteur, at least in the traditional French/Cahiers du Cinema sense, and I’m certainly interested to see how his career progresses, whether in the horror genre or beyond.