As staged by director Mike Flanagan, whose feature career consists mostly of horror titles - including Before I Wake and Gerald’s Game - these hunts generate distress given the children’s dreadful fates as nothing more than ghoul food. The most gruelingly effective scenes involve Rose’s never-ending search for new prey, which arouses some genuine emotion on behalf of the gifted kids about to be sacrificed for the sake of some grungy vampires (no, there’s no lower-class revenge subtext stirred into this mix). So good and evil are once again poised to duke it out, with a few agreeable wrinkles worked in among the stale ones. Played with mesmerizing elan by Ferguson (in a turn that, partly because of her black headgear, calls to mind Lena Olin’s striking profile as Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being) , Rose is forever on the lookout for psychic kids to kidnap, as the blood of her victims furthers the quest for immortality among her ratty, trailer-trash brood, whose eyes light up at feeding time. Dan is good at this job - he knows how to speak to people at death’s door - but isn’t nearly as skilled as the house cat, which has the uncanny ability of tipping off who will die next simply by entering the appropriate room and jumping on the doomed one’s bed.Ī provocative woman with the curious name of Rose the Hat is herself an expert at moving people from the earthly realm to another. A drifter pushing 50 and a recovering alcoholic, he’s still plagued by memories of those weird little girls up at the Overlook and presently takes a job working as an orderly at a small-town New Hampshire hospice. 1 best-seller, indicating a continuing public interest in this flawed fellow whose life has never been easy.Ī hard-luck case since his youth, Danny (a low-key Ewan McGregor), now going by Dan, has evidently had a pretty rough time of it over the years. King himself again took up the story of Danny Torrance (son of Jack and Wendy), the little boy blessed/cursed with unusual psychic powers, in his 2013 novel Doctor Sleep, an immediate No. Has it really been 39 years since Kubrick’s elaborate, fastidious, popular but critically divisive adaptation of King’s third novel, of which the author himself was its most vociferous critic? In the interim there has been a poorly received 1997 four-hour miniseries adaptation on ABC, as well as a warmly embraced 2016 operatic version. release, which in terms of scares and jolts is pretty mild by contemporary horrorfilm standards. The vast army of Stephen King fans alone ensures a good commercial launch for this well-appointed Warner Bros. It doesn’t have Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick or even much of the Overlook Hotel, but Rebecca Ferguson and other good actors provide some shine of their own in Doctor Sleep, a drawn-out and seldom pulse-quickening follow-up to The Shining that still has enough going on to forestall any audience slumber.

Doctor sleep shining