Doctor Sleep: Neon NZ Film Review

A follow on to The Shining was a book nobody ordered, yet Stephen King delivered it.

And thus it is with Mike "House on Haunted Hill" Flanagan's film version of said book.

Picking up decades after the Overlook Hotel scarred his psyche, Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor, withdrawn and dour) is stumbling around life, living his father's tortured hell of violence and alcoholism. Riding a bus to the middle of nowhere to start anew, Torrance finds himself pulled back into the world he desperately wants to avoid when his gift connects him with Abra, a girl who's witnessed a brutal murder.

But it also puts her on a collision course with a group of vampires led by Rose the Hat (an enigmatic, charismatic and magnetic turn from Rebecca Ferguson) who feed on Abra and Danny's special gift....

Doctor Sleep is sombre, evocative and at times, mournful.

It's also not its own beast, with shots recreated from Kubrick's cupboard with panache and familiarity and with a final sequence that suffers because it's a repeat of some of The Shining's best moments, given a new spit and polish.

It may be muted and contemplative, and lack its own horrors, but there are elements of Doctor Sleep to much admire.

Ferguson, channeling a kind of demonesque Stevie Nicks is a powerful presence, and a baddie who plays with your sympathies from the start. Owning the screen from the moment she's on, her lithe and charismatically terrifying demon is a human step up from anything witnessed in Near Dark, and she manages easily to con empathy out of the audience that should be opposed to her.

McGregor has a tougher job, selling an iconic follow on to a tortured Danny; but a quiet turn, coupled with the film's more languid approach to the psychology of what happens next, reaps muted rewards.

A more showy performer would have damaged the film's intentions, and McGregor's languid pace and style yields limited results when it should.

It's not all perfect.

Curtis is wasted in a one note role, various shocks are squandered simply for narrative speed, and yet there's a laid back pacing here that doesn't quite work.

The final sequences at the Overlook Hotel serve only to remind what The Shining offered - an abject take on terror, on a family unit imploding in the face of evil - and Doctor Sleep suffers in comparison.

Yet, while the source material may be the issue here, Doctor Sleep's commitment to its lived in characters offers limited rewards - go in expecting an all-out psychological assault like Kubrick mastered and you'll be sorely disappointed.

 It may struggle to provide iconic moments of its own, and some of its best you'll have seen before, but Doctor Sleep's atmospheric nightmare has a way of weaving into your soul when it shouldn't.