phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2020

Doctor Sleep



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2019
Runtime: 2h 32min
Country: UK, USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Drama, Fantasy, Horror
Plot Summary: Years following the events of The Shining (1980), a now-adult Dan Torrance must protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with powers to remain immortal.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Combo sequel to both the book and film versions of The Shining. An epic story about how, regardless of how you deal with them, past traumas never go away, and constantly circle back in metaphorical and literal ways. The only way out is through, and this movie is a wild, bittersweet ride to inevitable conclusions that somehow never feel that inevitable until the end. Director's cut is recommended.


Outside Reviews:

Brian Tallerico
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

I'm honestly not sure how well a movie like 1BR will play for horror fans now that there are so many true-Mike Flanagan's Doctor SleepThe Haunting of Hill House. It is an often effective blend of the three as it's forced to pay more homage to Kubrick's vision than King was in his book, which served purely as a sequel to a novel that the filmmaker had drastically changed when he adapted it in 1980. Flanagan was tasked with making a sequel to a film that stays loyal to a book that ignores the changes made in the first movie. That ain't easy. Different characters are in different places at the end of the book and film versions of "The Shining," and Flanagan has to tie the two together. For example, King's original book ends with the explosion of the Overlook Hotel. We all know that Kubrick's The Shining does not. And while one can sometimes feel Flanagan struggling to satisfy both King and Kubrick fans when he really should be trusting his own vision, he's talented enough to pull off this difficult blend of legacies.


A.A. Dowd
Grade: C+ - Like poor Danny Torrance, Doctor Sleep can't escape the long shadow of The Shining

Ostensibly, the source material here is the bestseller of the same name, King's own very belated sequel to The Shining, which was met with more shrugs than shrieks when it hit bookstores six years ago. There's even less of The Overlook in the novel, which makes sense, given that King burned the whole damn thing down at the end of the original. Kubrick, of course, kept the building standing, and that may be one reason writer-director Mike Flanagan opted to approach as both an adaptation of the book and a direct sequel to the 1980 movie. The resulting film suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. Compounding the already considerable disconnect between King's two stories, Doctor Sleep can't always seem to decide if it wants to be its own thing or a kind of throwback fetish object, a tribute to the cult of Kubrick. Neither movie sharing real estate over its two and a half hours is especially satisfying.