Five thoughts on Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep

There won't be a Wednesday newsletter this week because my life has truly turned upside down. If you're a paid subscriber, the Andor recap will be waiting for you on Friday like always, but the next free newsletter will come out next week sometime. That said, I didn't want Halloween to pass without you getting a little treat, so here's a broadly repurposed version of my Letterboxd review of Mike Flanagan's 2019 Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep. I love that movie and thought this review was pretty all right, and if you don't routinely check out my Letterboxd, this will be new to you! See you next week.

The below contains spoilers. It also broadly discusses the director's cut of Doctor Sleep, which I think is pretty fantastic. The theatrical cut is merely Pretty Good.

Five thoughts I had about Doctor Sleep after watching the director's cut:

1. Stephen King is hokey bullshit.

That's one reason I sometimes struggle with his writing. I can certainly appreciate what he does, and I find several of his novels incredibly satisfying. But even in his best work, there's a sense of a man who sees everything out a very narrow window. King's moral and philosophical point-of-view are absolutely Boomer Dad in all their particulars, and you could imagine him seeing Top Gun: Maverick and being, like, "But what if there were a plane that could eat people!" Even in his most cocaine-addled books, there's an underlying sense of How the World Works that is never really challenged or complicated. I don't say that as a complaint, even. It's just an observation. And when you can't lock into his worldview, well, it feels pretty alienating.

(Note: I have not read any of the Dark Tower books, because they seem like they would be all of the above but way too much. If I'm wrong, please disabuse me.)

Mike Flanagan is also some hokey bullshit, but a specifically Gen X/Millennial brand of hokey bullshit, which is defined as much by forever feeling dwarfed by giants who refuse to leave the horizon. As such, he's a weirdly perfect choice to adapt King, who either needs a director who will take his plot hooks and drag them toward their preferred stylings (see also: Stanley Kubrick) or a director who will just tilt all the way over into the hokey fun.

Doctor Sleep is a movie about Fathers And Daughters And The Legacy Of Bad Parents And The Idea That Love Will Win In The End, and it's almost perfect, even though it shouldn't be. King's hokey bullshit and Flanagan's hokey bullshit simultaneously cancel each other out and make a beautiful baby together.

2. The entire cast of Doctor Sleep is dialed in, but Ewan MacGregor (as the grown-up Dan Torrance, aka the little kid from The Shining) and Rebecca Ferguson (as the villainous, vampiric Rose the Hat – yes, that's her name) are almost better than the movie deserves. And this is a movie I think is terrific!

MacGregor has somehow always been underappreciated for a man who's done so much great work, while Ferguson is an actor who's exciting even in the worst movie imaginable. Here, they're both vibrating on a completely different wavelength of their own, one that exists in a movie that's about the worries we have that our darkest selves will be the ones that live on after we die. Ferguson's character has embraced that notion; MacGregor's character is trying to wrestle with it. But the movie, so influenced by all of King, sort of turns them into the good and evil proxies from The Stand, whispering from afar to psychic child Abra and trying to draw her to their way of thinking.

Of course, this is latter-day King, so a plucky teenage girl could never be evil. (Could he still write Carrie? I kind of doubt it.) But Ferguson's performance goes a long way toward letting the film make you think a teen girl might break bad.

3. Maybe doing so much television has made Flanagan a sharper filmmaker? I really enjoyed his early films, but there was a mathematical ruthlessness to them. The deeper themes in Oculus seem like they were arrived at after a script note asked for more character depth.

TV, if it's any good, requires you to invest so much more time in character, and the plot, such as it is, has to unfold from them almost every time. As such, Flanagan's time in the Netflix salt mines has slowly built up his ability to wed his ability to draw from absolutely every horror movie he's ever seen with a brutal efficiency while also providing richer character storytelling. That's very evident in this film, which seems like it takes forever to get going (seriously, almost 90 minutes of the director's cut are spent on just maneuvering characters into place) but rarely drags, because he's so interested in these little character filigrees.

On TV, his new instincts sometimes get him into trouble. (The finale of The Haunting of Hill House is....... well, it has problems.) In this movie and his more recent TV work (Midnight Mass, especially), he's found some new gear that's really exciting.

4. In a movie that lavishes so much time on Dan's personal demons, it's pretty irritating that his buddy Billy is reduced to cannon fodder. Is Cliff Curtis the current actor most doomed to turn up solely so you can say "Hey, it's Cliff Curtis!" and then coast off of that as the entirety of his characterization? I'm afraid he might be.

5. I'd read, like, two reviews of this before I wrote this piece, so take this with a grain of salt. One of those reviews, however, dinged a late scene at the bar in the Overlook, where Dan meets the ghost of someone who might be his father. The review argued this scene undercuts the movie's themes. Isn't the idea of Dan being so tempted by the father who literally tried to kill him that he considers taking another drink and joining his murderous father forever and ever and ever completely unbelievable: Why would you go back to an abusive parent?

Well, let me ask you this: Why wouldn't you?

Doctor Sleep exists in the long shadow of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a movie that it borrows iconography from but little else. And yet anybody watching this movie will surely know how much Stephen King hates Kubrick's film, which is a tremendously effective movie about living in an abusive household.

King believes that Jack Nicholson's performance in the Kubrick film is too bananas from the word go. There should be more of a progression, he argues. But that's the thing Kubrick saw in The Shining that I think rattled King, who had clearly modeled Jack Torrance just a bit on himself: Jack Torrance's motivations don't matter if you look at him from Wendy Torrance's point-of-view. And The Shining (film) is in Wendy's point-of-view. Maybe the seduction of evil is scary on the page, but in a movie, it's a lot scarier to be trapped with the monster and have to navigate that hedge maze over and over and over again because some part of you wants to believe he's not the monster you see.

What's ingenious about Doctor Sleep (film) is how it squares this circle. Dan sees someone who might be his father again, and he wants, desperately, to believe that he's not the monster, even as he knows better. Growing up in an abusive household is all about creating a version of your abuser that you can love, and over time, you do love that person. You love them so desperately that when you are confronted with the evidence of who they are, you reject that evidence until you're finally ready to face it clear-eyed, or you disappear into some form of distraction and disconnection. And in all of those states, the seductive power of just spreading your pain outward into the world is always present, woozy, on the horizon. It can be so, so tempting, and fighting it off is a constant struggle.

By placing a truncated version of the original Jack Torrance arc from the book on Dan's shoulders in this movie, Flanagan seems like he's finally giving King what he always longed for out of Kubrick's film. Instead, he's only underscoring the genius of what Kubrick did. You want to believe there's something good in there, after all, but you are only looking at a ghost. When Dan finally dies, the ghost who visits him isn't Jack; it's Wendy, the parent who could actually love him for who he was.

There have been a lot of horror films "about trauma" of late, and I'm sure somebody somewhere in Doctor Sleep's marketing said the same about this film. What I find fascinating, however, is that it isn't really trying to be about trauma in any real way. What it's interested in is the seductive power of those traumatic echoes that reverberate through our lives, the ways we are always drawn back, inexorably, to the source.

The free edition of Episodes is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James, who covers whatever she feels like writing about, but if you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).