Doctor Sleep (2019)

Almost 40 years after Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece The Shining, comes its sequel, Doctor Sleep.  The story take place about 40 years after the events that ended The Shining, and to be fair, it took author Stephen King almost as many years to come up with this follow-up. It is a famously well known fact that Stephen King was not a fan of Kubrick's interpretation of his novel and he was particularly annoyed with Kubrick's ending which deviated from his novel's.. Nevertheless Kubrick's The Shining achieved cult and classic status and is often regarded as the version people would remember and think of whenever you mention The Shining. Because of that, Doctor Sleep is being marketed and filmed as a sequel to Kubrick's version rather than Stephen King's novel.

Director Mike Flanagan (writer and director of last year's TV's The Haunting of Hill House) has the difficult task of trying to please Stephen King and fans of Kubrick's version with this sequel. I made it a point to read the novel first before watching this to see how he pulled this off. Apparently Mike Flanagan managed to get Stephen King's blessing by incorporating the ending of The Shining novel which was not in Kubrick's film into the ending of this story thereby providing a sort of closure to Stephen King's grouch about it being left out by Kubrick. This also gave Flanagan the opportunity to revisit the Overlook Hotel and play tribute to Kubrick's film with the hotel sets and interiors lovingly reproduced and even multiple scenes from the original film re-filmed here with look alike actors playing the roles made famous by Jack Nicholson, Shelly Duvall and a very young Danny Lloyd, and even the use of the soundtrack music from Kubrick's movie.

Personally, I had mixed feelings for this approach. While I thought the references to Kubrick's movie were in fact the movie's highlights, they somehow did not fit in to the storyline very well. This is especially apparent for those who have read the novel. The ending in the movie is very different including the outcome of key characters. I should think Stephen King would have been even more outraged by this since I feel the differences here were very significant. While the movie followed the novel quite faithfully in the first half, it fell apart for me in the second half as the novel's more complex and exciting ending was tremendously simplified. Indeed many characters in the novel ends up looking pretty one dimensional. Not even the usually reliable, Ewen McGregor had the opportunity to er .. "shine" in his lead role. As Dan Torrance, the adult of the little boy tormented by Jack Nicholson in the first film, the character is complex and ever evolving over time. Here, the movies simplified everything and Dan comes across as a rather unmemorable character.

All in I found Doctor Sleep a bit of a mess. My favourite moments were the bits that reminded us of the Shining but despite the use of the same music, same looking settings, and look-a-like actors, these scenes paled in comparison with Kubrick's version. At the end of the day, Doctor Sleep serves as a validation of the superiority of Kubrick's version. You will probably be far more satisfied and entertained by watching Kubrick's The Shining again.