Early reactions have arrived for Doctor Sleep, ahead of The Shining sequel and Stephen King movie adaptation's release in November. The film is based on King's novel of the same name, but functions as a followup to both King's original Shining book and Stanley Kubrick's classic 1980 film version (of which King, somewhat infamously, is not a huge fan).
Written and directed by Flanagan (who previously adapted King's novel Gerald's Game into a critically acclaimed Netflix film), Doctor Sleep stars Ewan McGregor as a forty-something year old Danny Torrance from The Shining. Having become an alcoholic (like his father) in his efforts to suppress his shining powers and deal with the trauma of his past, Danny travels to a small Massachusetts town where he joins a support group and uses his abilities to comfort the dying at a local hospice. However, when a young girl seeks his help in battling an evil cult (The True Knot) that preys on children who "shine", Danny realizes that in order to help her, he must finally confront the - literal - ghosts from his own childhood.
Doctor Sleep doesn't open in theaters for another two weeks, but Warner Bros. has gone ahead and lifted the embargo on social media press reactions ahead of then. You can check some of them out in the space below.
Most of these early reactions agree that Doctor Sleep is a worthy sequel to King and Kubrick's versions of The Shining alike, as well as an altogether excellent horror film on its own terms. Rebecca Ferguson costars as the villainous Rose the Hat (the leader of The True Knot) and her performance is also singled out as being one of the best elements - if not the best element - of the movie at large. What few complaints there are seem directed at Doctor Sleep's attempts to recreate the iconography and most famous imagery from Kubrick's The Shining specifically. But while WB has focused heavily on those aspects with the film's marketing, those who've read King's book know they're not as prevalent in grown-up Danny's story as the Doctor Sleep trailers would have you believe.
With a runtime just over two and a half hours long (which is even longer than Kubrick's film), it sounds like Doctor Sleep takes advantage of the extra space to really dig deeply into the themes of trauma and addiction at the heart of King's source material. One of the common complains about September's IT Chapter Two was just its narrative didn't justify its near-three hour length, but that doesn't appear to be the case with this year's other anticipated Stephen King movie sequel. Hopefully, the actual reviews will be just as enthusiastic as these reactions and Doctor Sleep will prove to be yet another great horror film to add to this year's collection.
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