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Doctor Sleep — Review
Mike Flanagan reconciles King and Kubrick in one of the year’s best horror films, bringing warmth and hope seldom found in the genre.
Stephen King’s brand of horror has always been deeply rooted in human emotion. Many times, the physical monsters and ghosts that King conjures are secondary horrors to the trauma they cause his characters. That’s why King’s voice works so well — he writes character-first fiction. This tendency for character drama over scares has only become more prominent in the writer’s work recently, especially in Doctor Sleep, the sequel to his classic novel, The Shining.
Upon first reading Doctor Sleep, I thought we would never see a film adaptation of it without retconning everything that Stanley Kubrick did in his 1980 adaptation of The Shining. It’s common knowledge that King infamously disliked Kubrick’s film, feeling as though it stripped away the humanity of his novel and made Jack Torrance a one-note lunatic. Yet, the film is an iconic piece of pop culture and cinema, and rightfully so. It’s a wonderful film; it’s just a much different beast than King’s novel of a family being torn apart by ghosts and addiction. This presents a unique challenge for an adaptation of King’s sequel.
