Not Enough Shine
Directed by: Mike Flanagan
Written by: Stephen King, Mike Flanagan
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Kyliegh Curran, Rebecca Ferguson
Swift shot: This is far from The Shining. Everything is explained and essentially the magic and fear is sucked out of the story. And while I hate the term Mary Sue, Abra is basically another nearly flawless character who never appears to be in true danger. Still, I enjoyed seeing how things worked out for little Danny, even if it was predictable by the first act.
Stephen King is the prolific Master of Horror, and he’s always been a fantastic storyteller. His characters are usually interesting, relatable, and dynamically layered.
A film is only as good as its antagonist or villain, and in Doctor Sleep we get Rose the Hat (Ferguson) who is a predator, the leader of her pack of wolves that have survived for eons. She will do whatever is necessary to keep herself, and her gypsy cohorts called the True Knot, alive.
Rose is an eater of souls, and what makes her terrifying is that she can consume your soul over hundreds of years, if she so chooses. She captures your soul in these specially designed containers that look like twisted Tervis tumblers, and then she doles out the “steam” to her pack as she deems necessary.
But what makes her less scary is her visage. She looks like a Woodstock reject who has to always wear this weird hat, and I kept thinking surely there will be some payoff about that odd proclivity. That would be interesting. But, alas, we never find out, and that is probably the one thing that isn’t explained to the infinite level in Doctor Sleep.
Rose’s right hand hellion is Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon) who is getting kind of tired of Rose always dictating when they get to feed. One bit of humor, that reminded me of Once Bitten, is when Rose and Crow complain about how the steam has been sucked out of the world thanks to everyone focusing on their smart phones. I can attest that the digital age has dampened psychic energy. It’s a real problem!
Rose and the True Knot spend their time looking for little scraps of steam, but they are about to discover the supersensory smorgasbord when they stumble onto Abra Stone (Curran).
Meanwhile, Dan Torrance (McGregor) is now all grown up and has become a drunk and kind of horrible human being. Still, his guide from the other side, Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly) comes around to protect him when needed. He’s even shown Dan how to confront the ghosts from the Overlook Hotel.
It was at this moment I knew exactly how the rest of the film was going to play out, and short of a few scenes with the soul eating pack, I might as well have had predictive text for how everything fell into place.
Dan moves to New Hampshire to escape a troubled past, and maybe a murder or something. I was a bit lost on that, because the “ghost” who delivers the line was hard to understand. But, he meets Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis) who is basically the most trusting guy in New England. Billy sets him up with a place to stay and a job.
Once Dan meets a friendly doctor at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, he is soon given a more rewarding job at the doctor’s hospice. This was my favorite aspect of the movie, and I loved how we got to see Dan help the people transition to the other side.
Plus, there was a nice allusion to a certain cat named Azrael who was able to predict the next person to die in the hospice. This is based on an actual cat named Oscar. But in our story, Azzie (the angel of death) helps lead Dan to his next old timer moving on.
At some point during this time, he’s made a kind of psychic pen pal with a complete stranger, Abra.
And Abra finally catches the attention of Rose the Hat and her band of murdering scumbags. In one truly horrific nightmare, she is connected to Rose as she brutally guts and eviscerates a kid played by Jacob Tremblay.
[Swift aside: Can we talk about how messed up Tremblay’s parents are? In Bruno, we are shown the kind of parents who will let their kids be in any film, show, or commercial, regardless of how it might damage the kid. Given that Tremblay has been in Room, Good Boys, and now this, what in the Hell are these people doing to this kid’s psyche?]
The True Knot collects more than just a soul that night, they collect a pair of enemies in Dan and Abra.
The rest of the movie is spent confronting Rose and her callous cohorts and leading us back to the Overwatch Hotel.
With Doctor Sleep, you can tell Director Flanagan cut out a lot of character background to keep the action going. Yet, for some reason that baffles me, we are shown countless road trips that add nothing to the story.
This overt transitioning has become a trend in films and shows lately, showing pointless travel. It’s like playing an MMORPG and wondering how long it is going to take to get to the action already. Unless something is happening in these scenes, cut them out.
Oh, and there is this heartbeat sound effect which is over deployed and downright annoying at times.
Speaking of annoying, when I see a Stephen King movie, I am expecting to be scared. There were really only two scenes that were considered “scary” to me.
When the kid is murdered in such a savage fashion. That’s horrifying, because it could happen to any kid, it doesn’t have to be a group of ghoulish monsters. As I have often said, people are far scarier than any monster Hollywood could ever conjure up.
And the scene where Abra confronts Rose was novel, because you are seeing the hero deal with the bad guy, but you are also kind of creeped out by the hero herself given her unnerving appearance.
But, sadly they managed to saturate the movie with the old naked lady from Room 237 enough to stifle the effect she used to have on me. Maybe some of that blame goes to Ready Player One too, as that Shining sequence was turned into a humorous bit.
But, in spite of those gripes, I did like the film, for the most part.
If you’ve always been curious about the fate of little Danny Torrance, you’ll have to either read Doctor Sleep or see the film. And I am growing into a big fan of Mike Flanagan, but I do think there is room for improvement in his storytelling.
