After the Overlook – Doctor Sleep (2019)

The sequel you didn’t know you wanted.  Many a moon has passed since the events at the Overlook Hotel.  Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is all grown up now, but he never lost his gift to shine.  He starts to communicate with a young girl with similar powers (Kyliegh Curran), only to find she is very much in danger, as she is being hunted down by a cult who feeds on people who have their gift.  Now I love The Shining like any self-respecting critic; I don’t hesitate to give it a spin if it ever starts to fade from memory, and for being almost 40 years old, it holds up remarkably well.  I didn’t however, have any familiarity with Doctor Sleep.  I was vaguely aware that Stephen King wrote a sequel to The Shining, but I never reached a point where I picked it up to give it a read.  I haven’t seen every single film, but from what I have seen, this is my favorite Stephen King adaptation since The Shawshank Redemption.

That is not something that I was exactly expecting.

Now, this is directed by Mike Flanagan, and if that name sounds familiar but you can’t place him, I have five words for you: The Haunting of Hill House.  Who else could possibly be better to direct a big haunted house movie, right?  But that’s just the thing: Doctor Sleep isn’t really a haunted house movie.  For the vast majority of the story, this is something else entirely.  While The Shining is a movie that doesn’t really have a ton to do with the titular ability, this movie is much more focused on how this power actually works, and I greatly appreciated that.  In fact, I would go so far to say that if you walked into Doctor Sleep expecting it to be a remake of The Shining, you’re going to leave severely disappointed.  Even though there are a ton of throwbacks skillfully placed throughout, this is a wildly different type of story.  It’s more of a thriller than it is a horror film, and I have to give a huge tip of my hat to them for explaining elements of the mystery without ruining the recipe.  If anything, you understand the rules even more than after you watched The Shining, so really, all this does is enhance.

I honestly just want to watch both of these films back to back as a double feature.

While I did watch this on the tired side, I was never bored with it, which is a pretty high compliment to pay a movie that is 152 minutes long.  I don’t want to ruin any of the surprises to it, which is why I am not going heavy into descriptions, but I was tense the whole time, and there is such attention paid to detail that I loved everything that I was watching.  I have a couple of nitpicky things that I could go into, but if I am being honest, it is probably best that they didn’t delve into them for time constraints.  I could also see this succeeding as a miniseries with about eight episodes or so, and I know I can’t be the only one out there that wants more of this universe.  I think this is excellent and highly accessible, and I think that I am going to see if I can find an audiobook of this and The Shining and listen to them back to back.

Doctor Sleep (2019) ****1/2

– Critic for Hire

Want to see where this fell in my list of best films of 2019?  See for yourself here.