Doctor Sleep

Steven King notoriously doesn’t like Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, and from that, you get the feeling that he doesn’t understand what makes a good adaptation. One of the basic rules is that loyalty to the book is not the mark of a good adaptation. Depending on the source material, it can be a benefit or a detriment. Having never read the book Doctor Sleep, I will make an educated guess and say that the movie follows the book rather closely. At least close enough for Mr. King to like this adaptation despite its deliberate connection to Kubrick’s Shining universe. I know this for two reasons: the movie is long, and it lacks any coherent focus.

Doctor Sleep picks up the story of The Shining years later as Danny Torrance tries to get his life on track when a band of people who kill people with the shining hunt a special girl who asks Danny for help. From minute one, Doctor Sleep is a Steven King adaptation that also pays considerable homage to Stanley Kubrick. The whole film feels like a weird blend of the two. It takes the new story that has little in common with Kubrick’s world and infrequently interrupts the new narrative with copied and pasted moments from Kubrick’s film. The film is built to both make King happy as well as weaponize the audience’s nostalgia for The Shining with all of its glorious cinematic aesthetic. There are shots stolen right out of Kubrick’s film, serving as a reminder that you’d rather be watching that instead.

Doctor Sleep, like The Shining, is a long movie. It’s practically novelistic with the epic storyline that is constantly moving and shifting its perspective. The film’s biggest problem is that it never really focuses its attention on where it needs to be. It’s constantly interested in story elements that don’t serve any function other than to adapt the novel and have things happen.

The movie works best when it focuses on Danny’s struggle to keep his life in order and find new meaning. There is a great 100-minute supernatural character study trapped in a 150-minute monstrosity. That storyline was by far the best part of the movie. And despite the jarring transplanting of Kubrick imagery, I found myself getting emotional in one or two scenes. However, by the time the second half of the movie rolls around the narrative has largely exhausted Danny’s engaging character development and moves on to a more cliched narrative.

The movie wants to adapt so much material, and it tries it’s hardest to do so with its two and a half hour running time. The problem is that there are so many dead-end elements that never get paid off. As much as there is to love about the design and evilness of the mustache-twirling villains, their story lacks any justification for the time spent with them. There is a ten-minute sequence at the beginning where a woman uses her shining powers to punish a child molester. You would think she would be a hero from that introduction, but she is actually a very minor antagonist and a few scenes later is involved in child murder. Why? What was the point of spending all the time to develop her “motivation” and subsequent turn to the dark side when she is relegated to a grand total of 3 minutes of screen time for the rest of the movie? The film is filled with scenes like that, getting the novel’s plot on-screen while never really adding anything to the movie’s narrative.

This film would’ve benefited immensely from severely slimming down the novel’s content and focusing the plot on what really matters: Danny Torrance. But Doctor Sleep lacks any form of subtly or cinematic creativity. It barrels through its narrative with the slow-moving grace of an 18-wheeler. The design and multi-strand narrative felt like it should’ve been a TV miniseries. At least on TV it would’ve had time to develop and pay off all the characters it clearly wanted to do something with. As it stands, the movie spends time where it shouldn’t and ignores that which merits attention, creating a narrative that lacks any creative filmmaking. There are plenty of literal magic tricks in the movie, but it lacks any real movie magic.