Doctor Sleep (2019)

	Directed by: Mike Flanagan	COUNTRY USA Genre Horror NORWEGIAN TITLE Doctor Sleep RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
	Produced by: Trevor Macy Jon Berg
	Written by (based on the novel by Stephen King): Mike Flanagan

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Dan Torrance	Ewan McGregor
Rose the Hat	Rebecca Ferguson	½
Abra Stone	Kyliegh Curran
Dick Hallorann	Carl Lumbly
Crow Daddy	Zahn McClarnon	½
Snakebite Andi	Emily Alyn Lind
Dr. John Dalton	Bruce Greenwood	-
Lucy Stone	Jocelin Donahue	-
Billy Freeman	Cliff Curtis	-
Barry the Chunk	Robert Longstreet	-
Grandpa Flick	Carel Struycken	-
Wendy Torrance	Alex Essoe	-
Dave Stone	Zackary Momoh	-
Bradley Trevor	Jacob Tremblay

Review

The long-awaited follow-up to The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 2013 sequel, has in many ways become a strange bird: a freestanding and quite distinctive story that is baked into the original novel’s universe and – ultimately into Kubrick’s cinematic framework. The scope is grand, and the ambitions considerable, which was arguably the only possible option. The writer and director chosen for the project is Mike Flanagan, of TV horror fame (The Haunting of Hill House) and the less successful King adaptation Gerald’s Game from 2017. He has an aesthetic vision and includes several elements that give the film a richness from which to spin and elaborate the tale. But not all his choices are equally effective, and at times the film takes on an unmistakable feel of fan-fiction. The one-dimensional character of Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and our protagonists' largely underwhelming boss fight with her in an otherwise overstated finale does little to retain one of The Shining’s main assets: the mystique. In Doctor Sleep, everything is neatly laid out and explained, which ultimately gives the film a puerility that hardly will ensure it the lasting legacy of the original.