Friday, 6 December 2019

Doctor Sleep

For a movie that doesn't entirely have a sensible reason to exist and has a plot setup that is kinda odd, this is quite reasonable. And I'm aware that probably comes as slightly lefthanded praise, but ... this isn't really any sensible kind of sequel to "The Shining", so much as a "Stephen King wanted to write a novel about a psychic kid and the older psychic who mentors her in battle with other evil psychics, and realised he already had a psychic kid from a previous novel thirty odd years back". Mike Flanagan's film does an interesting job of managing to combine the concerns of the sequel novel, the original novel AND the very much altered film that Stanley Kubrick did of the original novel to make something that, if it doesn't exactly have the depth of the original, does surprisingly well. It's definitely nice to have Rebecca Ferguson as a very active villain after she spent most of "The Kid Who Would be King" stuck in a tree, and there's striking visuals that are all this film's own work in the middle third. There is a weird stoppy-starty energy in the first third before the various plot strands come together, but once this hits the ground it does it running and works pretty well.

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