Doctor Sleep (2019)

Rating: 4/10

Dan Torrance is now an adult and has settled down in a quiet part of New Hampshire, attending AA meetings and getting through his day to day working at a nursing home and harboring his abilities to comfort those in their last moments of life. He soon meets Abra who shares his gift of “Shining” and has an incredible natural ability that soon attracts the attention of The Truth Knot. Upon meeting her it brings back elements into Danny’s life that he’s been trying to forget for a lifetime, now he’s sucked into a fight for Abra’s soul and keeping her safe from Rose The Hat and her tribe of child snatchers.

I really do not like this film. The Shining has always been one of my all time favorites and it’s truly saddening that this film follows the same characters and gives an association to Kubrick's masterpiece.

I don’t hate this film because it’s not The Shining, quite the opposite in fact. All the redeeming parts of this film are when it creates a degree of separation from the original story and because of some of those elements i gave it a 4/10. For me the best part of this film was following Danny and seeing his relationship build with Abra. As well as Rebecca Ferguson who quite frankly is the star of the show. She made Rose The Hat a very interesting antagonist and I just wish they would have focused more on these elements rather than bringing in elements from the Shining and “tying up loose ends”. It’s widely known that Stephan King absolutely hates Kubrick's adaptation of his book. They are so different that it’s almost ridiculous to compare them. I can’t help but feel as though King would be much more satisfied with the job Mike Flanegan did with this adaptation of Dr Sleep over Kubrick’s of The Shining. The reason being is that this film seems to bring in themes from the Book rather than themes of the film that preceded it. The Shining (the book) is about a haunted house. The Shining (1980) is about haunted people. To me, this idea is much more scary than the haunted house elements, but this is not the place to go into this, i’ll cover more of this in my The Shining Review. 

Some things that really took away from this film were: the reenactment scenes from the original, the overuse of the rotting lady in the bathtub and the set design of the Overlook Hotel. In The Shining almost all scenes are well lit and the mise en scene is that of an unconventional horror, no cobwebs, no shadowy dark corners, very little jump scares. We compare that to scenes from this film of Danny roaming the corridors and all what made The Shining special is taken away. The bathtub scenes, wow oh wow. All I can say is that they reuse this very iconic scene about four or five times throughout the film and by the end of it, it wasn’t even creepy, it was just frustrating and felt so lazy. Another notable thing to mention is that this film is 2hr 30mins and it really feels far too long. In my opinion it would have been great to see more from the characters presented in this film as they were genuinely interesting and the performances were great. 

The thing that is the most frustrating about this film is that some parts are really good, if only they had focused on developing Rose The Hat more as well as the adult Danny I think they could have had a really great Horror on their hands. Unfortunately that's not what we got, we got throwbacks, easter eggs and the reenactments of scenes that look like they were made by a student filmmaker.

Conclusion

it’s not worth watching if you love The Shining, if you just fancy watching a Fantasy Horror or haven't seen The Shining it might be worth your time but for me it’s just a bad memory...yes i disliked it that much.