The film runs on for an unnecessarily extended 151 minutes, and that’s undoubtedly a by-product of the success of “It,” the lengthy 2017 adaptation of the first half of King’s killer-clown novel. I still don’t know if “The Shining” needed a second act, but “Doctor Sleep” presents one that’s fresh and unsettling enough to justify its existence. That it works as well as it does is a testament to the ominous pull of Stephen King’s imagination. That the movie works at all says something about how irresistible it is to go back there. And so the new movie, written and directed by Mike Flanagan, is at once an adaptation of King’s sequel and a theme-park horror lark that treats the Overlook as a nightmare playground we now get to revisit.
King is on record as having been dissatisfied with Kubrick’s film (I get why, since I think King’s novel is superior to the movie version), but “The Shining,” as a film, is now thought of as a classic. He did it six years ago, in his 531-page novel “ Doctor Sleep,” and the movie that has now been made of it combines that book, which follows the saga of Danny Torrance as an adult, with a deviously exacting replication of the mood and setting of Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
Then again, if anyone has the right to craft a sequel to “The Shining,” it’s Stephen King. But when you try to do a sequel to a film as iconic as “The Shining,” the result tends to come out like “The Two Jakes” or “The Godfather Part III” or “Psycho II”: a pale, forgettable, entirely superfluous imitation of the original. Nearly every aspect of Kubrick’s visualization of the Overlook Hotel and its live-in demons - the corridors with their ’70s-suburban-acid-trip orange-and-brown hexagon carpeting, the Diane Arbus twins in their teal party dresses, the Hawaiian Punch blood splashing out of the Navajo Deco elevators, the lobby with its adobe walls and high-ceilinged wagon-wheel chandeliers, the somnambulant British caretaker talking in the bathroom in hypnotic dream time, the rotting-old-lady specter emerging from behind the shower curtain of Room 237 - is as iconic as anything that exists in contemporary screen horror.Įven a good serious film, like “Before Sunrise” or “The Hustler,” can beg for a sequel. And in the 40 years since Stanley Kubrick’s spooky cerebral film version of “The Shining” came out, the movie has come to define the look and mystique of this story in our culture. Stephen King’s original novel, which was published in 1977, remains one of his greatest (it’s not a tale that needs to be messed with). On the face of it, making a sequel to “ The Shining” does not sound like a promising idea.
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