Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars
Bottom Line: Directors don’t let directors edit their own movies. Besides that flaw, a wonderful movie.
Directors of the world, we need to talk. It has come to my attention that some of you think you can edit your own movies. You cannot. Editors exist for a reason and that reason is to protect you from yourself. They have the skills to take your malleable “fantastic idea” and morph it into a coherent structure that flows smoothly with the rest of your other “fantastic ideas” and results in a finished product that is digestible to consumers. So say you absolutely LOVE Stanley Kubrick and you’re, I don’t know, making a movie based on Stephen King’s sequel to “The Shining”, let’s call it “Doctor Sleep” for the sake of argument, and say you want to make the denouement of your movie a tribute to Kubrick and his wonderful, though much maligned by Stephen King, movie “The Shining”. Your editor will really like this idea! They will be completely on board with it. Then, say, you want to show Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) returning to the hotel of his youth and slowly walking its halls for, say, ten minutes as lights flicker on with each hallway he walks down and intersperse it with iconic sets from the original movie culminating in Dan ending up at the same bar talking to the same ghost bartender that his father once talked to. Your editor will praise you for this vision and remark about how powerful the bar scene could be if you didn’t spend TEN FUCKING MINUTES HAVING THE MAIN CHARACTER WALK DOWN HALLS WITH LIGHTS FLICKING ON AT EVERY TURN TO THE POINT THAT THE AUDIENCE NO LONGER CARES ABOUT THIS FUCKING HOUSE OR ANYTHING THAT GOES ON INSIDE IT!. But your editor will say so much more patiently and kindly so as not to hurt your fragile director fee fees.
Ok, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let me say that “Doctor Sleep” is really a wonderful movie that has the potential to be perfect if they ever decide to come out with an Editor’s Cut. Up until they return to the hotel, the pacing and ambiance are just perfect. I have not read “Doctor Sleep”, but I will assume it’s like all Stephen King novels and there is a ton to unpack into a scant two and a half hours and director Mike Flanagan does a wonderful job. It helps when you have fantastic villains like Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). Rose the Hat is terrifying with her honeyed voice and her lithe and sinuous movements and her True Knot followers are an eclectic mix of normal and frightening quasi-immortals.
The True Knot are nomads who scour the earth for children with telepathic abilities so that they can torture and kill them which releases their “steam” which they can devour to stay immortal. Pretty creepy, huh? Stephen King is a delightful sicko. The Danny Torrence from “The Shining” is now an adult and coping with life about as well as you would expect for a person whose childhood was defined by a hotel possessing your father and following you around wherever you go. He strikes up a telepathic relationship with Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), a telepath with massive powers who eventually attracts the interest of Rose the Hat for obvious reasons and the two team up to defeat her and her True Knot.
Stephen King movies tend to be really good or really bad with not much in between. This one falls squarely in the really good category. It definitely needs a fast forward button near the end, but is well worth your time regardless if you’re a fan of King’s work. This isn’t a scary movie in the normal scary movie sense, but everything is horrifying nonetheless.