Doctor Sleep Review: Ewan McGregor Stars as Danny Torrance in Mike Flanagan’s Flawed Sequel to The Shining

   October 28, 2024

The Shining is one of my favorite movies of all time and certainly my favorite horror movie ever made. While that’s not entirely why I haven’t seen Doctor Sleep until now (five years after its 2019 release), I couldn’t help but feel as though Mike Flanagan‘s continuation of the Torrance family through now-adult Dan was fighting an uphill battle for I even hit play. And after middling critical assessment upon its release, I decided to skip over it.

Until now. I’ve officially seen Doctor Sleep. And I have to say.. I wish I had decided to skip over it for an additional five years. Doctor Sleep is a dreadful continuation of Stephen King‘s widely acclaimed horror novel, as well as an unworthy companion to Stanley Kubrick‘s indelible landmark horror picture from 1980. It avoids many of the stylistic choices that made The Shining a deliriously inviting movie, and many of the darkest motifs that made King’s world so riveting in the first place.

Ewan McGregor as Danny Torrance in Doctor Sleep (2019)
Ewan McGregor as Danny Torrance in Doctor Sleep (2019)

Instead, Doctor Sleep has the tone and framework of a superhero movie crossed with iconography from the world of The Shining. It is a straightforward good vs. evil story centered around an adult Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor). Danny’s past at the Overlook Hotel continues to haunt him night after night. His ability to “shine” doesn’t carry the same luster that it once did.

But he’s given the chance to his powers for good when a foe named Rose the Hat enters the picture, who, along with her team of fellow shiners, consumes those with similar powers as a source of energy and to improve their own abilities. They set their sights on a young girl Abra, who possess some of the strongest powers the world has seen.

You can see how this mirrors the superhero fare that has dominated moviegoing over the past decade. It’s the exact opposite that I had hoped for a sequel to The Shining. Mike Flanagan’s take on the material might be ill-conceived, but it is hard to imagine a rendering of this particular story that would feel like a seamless companion to one of the greatest horror movies ever made.

Ewan McGregor is an effective, mopey main character, but his reading of adult Danny doesn’t fully win me over. It’s not the most believable transformation for a character from child to adult, and perhaps that is because you’re supposed to accept on face value that this is who Danny has grown into without seeing the tweener years.

Kyliegh Curran plays Abra, and although she doesn’t give a bad performance, I didn’t need to get deep in the weeds about children being able to shine. One of the great aspects of Kubrick’s The Shining is that he understood what would make great movie material vs. what made great reading material. The dynamics of shining aren’t spelled out entirely in the 1980 movie, but there are enough details to buy in and allow the horror to take over.

Conversely, Doctor Sleep deep dives what shining actually is, which turns it into a movie about super powers and noisy fight sequences that do not provide much tension, intrigue, or surprise. Rebecca Ferguson plays the dull big bad here, and unfortunately Rose the Hat is about as bland as everything else in Doctor Sleep. She has the emotional volatility that makes for a few worthwhile scenes that translate, but her backstory and motivations are noticeably trite.

I don’t want to say that Mike Flanagan is a hack filmmaker, but I struggle to see why he’s being trusted with the keys to a few of cinema’s biggest franchises. The successes of a few so-so Netflix series (Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor) haven’t translated into exciting feature films. Hush is still quite possibly his best because there are a few individual set pieces to write home about, even if the sum of the pieces isn’t much. For Doctor Sleep, I struggle to even find the good set pieces.

There is supposedly a better director’s cut of Doctor Sleep out there that fills in the gaps of a few character traits, motivations, and decisions. Honestly, I’m not sure I care. This is about as rigorous and uninteresting as any horror franchise rebooted in recent memory. It’s a glossy, airless, and ultimately unnecessary return to a world that was perfect as is.

Score: 3/10

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