Streamin’ King: ‘Doctor Sleep’ Is A Spectacular ‘Shining’ Successor, As Well As A Surprising Sequel

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Doctor Sleep, the 2019 film based on the ’13 novel, a sequel to The Shining—both King’s 1977 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s ’80 adaptation.

STREAMIN’ KING: DOCTOR SLEEP

THE GIST: After an intro picking up months after The Shining, Danny Torrance reckons with the ghosts and trauma of the Overlook Hotel, gripped in adulthood by alcoholism and addiction he’ll defeat amid a quiet New Hampshire life. He teams with Abra Stone, a girl with a powerful shine, to face the True Knot, an RV-driving pack of itinerant soul-vampires led by the cunning Rose the Hat. Obligatory Shining flashbacks interspersed until the third act dives all the way into the house King and Kubrick built.
PEDIGREE: Directed, written, edited by Mike Flanagan (Netflix’s King adaptation Gerald’s Game and The Haunting of Hill House), who did the same creative hat-trick thrice in 2016 (Hush, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Before I Wake). Stars then-12-year-old Kyliegh Curran in her debut, Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible #5-7), Cliff Curtis (Fear the Walking Dead), and Zahn McClarnon (Fargo season 2). Uncannily impersonating Kubrick’s Shining stars are Henry Thomas (Hill House, E.T.), Carl Lumbly (Alias), and Alex Essoe. Appearances from Jacob Tremblay (Room), Jocelin Donahue (The House of the Devil), and Flanagan’s Gerald’s actors Bruce Greenwood (The Resident) and Carel Struycken (The Addams Family). Score and cinematography by Flanagan mainstays the Newton Brothers (The Grudge remake) and Michael Fimognari (Fast Color).
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Eminently so. Flanagan is arguably the most proven die-hard among filmmakers adapting King today. (He toted 1992’s Gerald’s Game to pitch meetings for years—meetings unrelated to Gerald’s—until Netflix let him adapt it.) He has a consummate ability to transcribe King’s vibe and storytelling strengths onto the screen, and purposefully places Dark Tower nods everywhere while most adaptations are just dumping Cujo, It, and—yes—Shining references willy-nilly.
Anecdotally, readers are said to have found Doctor Sleep to be lackluster or a true misfire, and they’ll find nothing but a meticulously faithful adaptation here—one that rewrites the final act to include the Overlook Hotel. It’s still standing in this Kubrick-acknowledging version, while King opted to wrap The Shining with one of his patented blow-it-up-n-burn-it-down endings. SK’s distaste for the other SK’s iconic handling of his work is exhaustively established (and parried by King’s own ’97 ABC miniseries), and that complication lives within both Sleep iterations, but Flanagan has no issue reconciling the divergent realities. It’s high-quality, scary, and at times ugly-cry emotional. The Knot gets fleshed out. The Shining narrative traveling from Colorado to King’s turf (New Hampshire, Maine; tomato, tomahto) feels good. McGregor’s an excellent rendition of Uncle Stevie’s “everyman who strolls into town in a blue chambray shirt and rents a room” type (‘Salem’s Lot, 11/22/63, even 2019’s The Institute) and should visit the Kingverse more often.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING AGNOSTICS/THE SHINING LOVERS)? Almost impossible to make a sweeping recommendation. For some, Sleep will be as satisfying as actual restful slumber. But Shining stans are justified in wanting more of what they love, and this isn’t exactly that, except for the thorough Overlook romp. The evil Dan faces and the shine-gifted Abra have on-paper commonalities with the Overlook’s ghouls and young Danny, although in practice they’re quite different. Sleep‘s safer than The Shining despite its sprawling ambitions, yet in terms of human depth, Dan’s story and Mike’s movie are superior to Jack’s plight and Stan’s movie.
And what a chill it is to hear that old theme music and those jazz tunes, see those beloved fonts and faithfully recreated visuals of the original (plus a couple flat-out reused shots, like Kubrick’s aerial zoom across that mountainside lake), and to stroll back up to—as exemplary King fan Gilbert Cruz said on The Big Picture—”one of the more famous movie edifices of all time.” It’s long, but just past an hour in you experience an unforgettable cinematic achievement, the astral projection sequence. Moments later you get a thrilling dip into ye olde hotel as Abra peers into Dan’s head, opening on Jack’s typewriter in that cavernous room. Viewers have singled out the climactic Overlook tour as lackluster or unnecessary, and the writing gets shakier and nostalgia checklist-y there. But why wouldn’t the hotel only be napping, demanding a revisit? So is every pop culture, icon, setting, intellectual property—until it (Halloween, The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, Ghostbusters, etc. etc.) isn’t anymore.

14 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Once Dan rolls into New Hampshire on a Tet Transit bus, three more overt Dark Tower nods hit in less than an hour: Tremblay’s #19 jersey, his scene at a LaMerk Industries plant, and Hallorann uttering the timeless Roland of Gilead–ism “ka is a wheel.” Elsewhere, a Joe Collins Live poster, and a balloon animal and decorative A forming “ka” on Abra’s headboard. Dan telling Abra “we don’t end” has a TDT feel, as does the Charlie the Choo-Choo–esque train in Teenytown.

2. Asked if Jack Nicholson was ever in the mix, Flanagan said he and the studio were curious if the now-82-year-old “wanted any participation in the film whatsoever, in a cameo, any capacity, but he declined. I think he’s serious about his retirement. But he offered his support and wished us the best and was aware of everything we were doing. If he had anything bad to say about it, I never heard it.”

3. Flanagan’s director’s cut adds almost a half-hour of material, bumping it from a Shining-comparable 2.5 hours to a three-hour feat. It adds chapter titles, more time with Abra’s family/younger self, the True Knot, and Dan’s crew at AA, where his longer speech includes a reference to his dad breaking his arm—which Kubrick changed to a dislocated shoulder. Dan’s meeting with Jack in the Overlook is extended, even including a visit to the red restroom.
   

   Flanagan said Warner Bros. thoroughly supported his “more literary” cut from the jump, ensuring “all of the new material with VFX was fully finished, additional score was composed and orchestrated just for this cut, and we did a full mix as well. They really let us do this right—it’s a finished, complete, fully polished new cut of the movie.”

4. Rose the Hat’s hand manglement doesn’t just echo Gerald’s Game—the same situation was also redone weeks before Doctor Sleep‘s premiere via Lizzy Caplan’s Annie Wilkes on Castle Rock season 2.

5. Swedes keep snapping up SK villain roles— Rebecca Ferguson here, plus Bill Skarsgård (It, Castle Rock) and his brother Alexander (this year’s The Stand miniseries). “I’m such a geek when it comes to Stephen King. I’m such a silly fan,” Ferguson said. Also: “I don’t see why we wouldn’t want to make films out of everything that he writes.”

6. Dan’s description of the True Knot—”they eat screams, and drink pain, and they’ve noticed that little girl”—is eerily close to the M.O. of The Outsider‘s villain, whose monikers include “grief eater” and “tear drinker.”

7. King’s son Joe Hill referenced Sleep in his novel NOS4A2, published months prior. “There is the True Knot, who live on the road and are in much the same line of work as myself,” says another revamped vampire, Charlie Manx. “I leave them be and they are glad to return the favor.” Then Hallorann dropped a Manx mention in Sleep.

8. King’s long author’s note at the end of Sleep has a lot of good stuff (“Did I approach the book with trepidation? You better believe it”), including:

   “The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining, but both remain interested in the same thing: telling a kickass story. I enjoyed finding Danny Torrance again and following his adventures. I hope you did, too. If that’s the case, Constant Reader, we’re all good.”

9. Sleep‘s made-for-goofy-snooze-related-headlines box office performance was rough—$31.6 million in the U.S. off a $14 million opening, $72.3M worldwide. Earlier in 2019, Pet Sematary made $54.7M domestic/$113M globally; It Chapter Two didn’t top its predecessor’s biggest-ever horror movie haul, but did secure $211.6M in America and $473M internationally. (The Shining‘s original haul was $46M, only $16,468 garnered overseas.) Sleep appears to be doing well on Blu-ray/DVD/VOD.

10. Repeat Kingverse visitors: The Shining‘s now-47-year-old Danny Lloyd cameos at the baseball game, his only credit besides Kubrick and an ’82 bit part. (Just like his character, Lloyd lost the nickname along the way and goes by Dan.) Also Bruce Greenwood (Gerald’s Game, where he uttered the Tower-ism “all things serve the Beam,” and The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a stage musical John Mellencamp co-wrote) and Henry Thomas, who in ’06 acted in both Desperation (alongside Steven Weber of the Shining miniseries) and a Nightmares & Dreamscapes episode penned by Lawrence D. Cohen of Carrie, The Tommyknockers, and ’90’s It. Oddly, Thomas appeared in Psycho IV, name-checked in King’s Doctor Sleep afterword as a rare “brilliant sequel,” helmed by King veteran Mick Garris. Three–time SK actor John Cusack, asked in 2014 which role he’d “accept in a heartbeat,” simply answered “Doctor Sleep.”

11. The road to an onscreen Shining successor was long: 2012 saw word of a prequel produced by Shutter Island scribe Laeta Kalogridis; by ’14 Overlook Hotel had tapped director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) and writer Glen Mazzara (The Walking Dead). That fizzled and Akiva Goldsman (perpetrator of vicious crimes against The Dark Tower) materialized in ’16 to adapt Sleep. Warner Bros. fast-tracked it in ’18 after its success with It, hiring Flanagan to rewrite Goldsman’s script and direct. “There is no version of the world where I am trying not to acknowledge one of the greatest films ever made,” Flanagan said of the thorny Kubrick/King Shining dichotomy.

SPOILERS

12. The clincher that “made [King] let us do this whole thing” was Mike pitching Steve the scene where Dan encounters his dad’s ghost. Though Flanagan stuck with Kubrick’s Room 237, he threw King’s 217 a bone by slapping it on a hospice room. Now the two have serious plans for future collaborations. “There are so many, and I’m not allowed to talk about them yet,” Flanagan said. He was reportedly developing a Dick Hallorann film before Sleep‘s poor box office performance, and has since said he’d “love” to do an Abra movie.

13. The Overlook suffers its original fate from the Shining novel, 42 years after the book hit, and Dan really is Abra’s uncle in the book.

14. This nine-minute side-by-side supercut of The Shining and Doctor Sleep is simply staggering.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Few critics gave total praise, often harping on the complex historical context, but it garnered enough love to earn 77 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The Denver Post said it “makes a convincing case for its own greatness”; USA Today contended it’s “more likely to keep you awake at night with the fresher stuff than the retreads.” Reelviews found it was too long but “more accessible and doesn’t overly penalize those who haven’t seen (or don’t remember) the original movie.” Strong praise from the Seattle Times deemed it “a monumental achievement of tension, suspense, forgiveness and sacrifice.” Variety thought it “may register, in the end, as a long footnote, but it makes you glad that you got to play in that sinister funhouse again.” Indiewire was irked that “pandering to dueling source material results in a jagged puzzle beneath both of their standards.” The Stephen King Cast prognosticated, “Even if it might not be recognized or celebrated in its time, there’s gonna be a lot of love for a long time about this particular movie.” And SK himself? “I always felt that the Kubrick film was rather cold, and director Mike Flanagan warmed it up.” He celebrated how MF “managed to take my novel of Doctor Sleep, the sequel, and somehow weld it seamlessly to the Kubrick version of The Shining, the movie.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR DOCTOR SLEEP (2013): 2012 saw King expand the finished-in-’04 Dark Tower saga with The Wind Through the Keyhole, and ’13 yielded the pulpy Joyland months before Sleep, King’s first ever sequel (discounting a co-written novel and the DT books). Followed in 2014 by Mr. Mercedes and Revival.
Zach Dionne is a North Carolina writer beaming love to Jack Dionne as he enters the clearing at the end of the path.

Where to stream Doctor Sleep