It’s a Thirsty World: A Deep Dive into Doctor Sleep

Though I’m obviously saying it anyway, it almost goes without saying that much like its source material, any appraisal of Mike Flanagan’s 2019 film adaptation of the Stephen King novel Doctor Sleep can only ever be truly assessed under the looming shadow of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of its predecessor, King’s The Shining. This is because Kubrick’s version has become an all but inescapable classic of horror culture, referenced in photo essays on “monumental” horror imagery and near-perfect episodes of The Simpsons alike (“All work and no play makes Homer something something?” “Go CRAZY? Don’t mind if I do!!!”). Which is why Flanagan — a well-known film/horror nerd and King fanatic, already noted for having made a perfectly fine Netflix movie out of King’s supposedly un-filmable book Gerald’s Game — was already perhaps the perfect person to translate Doctor Sleep from page to screen, long before the result demonstrated he was capable of both replicating the cinematic tone of Kubrick’s stay at the Overlook Hotel and re-inserting various notes from The Shining that Kubrick seemed uninterested in exploring…specifically, the difficult narratives of potential recovery and self-replicating trauma as viewed through a lens of addiction.

In Doctor Sleep, we rejoin telepathic youngster Danny as an adult, a man whose life thus far has been spent under the conjoined shadow of both his time at the Overlook and his father Jack’s death there, both of which he’s unsuccessfully tried to exorcise by (sadly, predictably) self-medicating with alcohol, drugs, random sex and violence. As a child, Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) learned to imprison the literal ghosts who once pursued him in psychic lockboxes located deep in his own subconscious, but he still can’t keep the other Overlook and after-related memories from seeping up, poisoning his mental groundwater with rich veins of guilt, anger, and a genetic propensity to want to drink until he passes out and wakes up with a bruise-ridden hangover, usually in a pile of his own vomit and the bed of somebody whose name he can’t recall.

Given King’s welcome honesty about his own struggles with addiction, it doesn’t seem like much of an ass-out-of-u-and-me assumption to point out that The Shining is a novel about alcoholism written by an alcoholic who hasn’t yet hit rock bottom, albeit one imaginative enough to be able to figure out how the very worst version of that moment might go. Similarly, Doctor Sleep — from its very inception — appears to have been a book about recovery written by a man familiar with the Twelve Step Program from the inside; it begins with Dan at his very lowest, the moment in which he realizes he has no further to fall, the moment he decides to dig himself out of his own potential grave. He does that by spending all the money he has on a bus ticket, getting off where it stops and finding the nearest Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Full disclosure: My mother once did this as well, for which I’m very grateful. (Not the bus ticket part, but everything else.) And the more I think about it, the more I realize that Doctor Sleep‘s structure — both in the book and in Flanagan’s movie — is so deeply based around AA recovery philosophy that it works its way right into the plot. By retroactively showing how psychic cook Dick Halloran (here played by Carl Lumbly) mentored Danny as a child and continues to mentor him as an adult (after death, ’cause Ka is a wheel and that’s the sort of narrative this is), it introduces the idea that the best way Danny can pay it forward is to mentor some other kid who “shines” as hard as he once did, or even harder. Which is, pretty much, what you’re supposed to do as part of your continuing recovery, in AA…accept other members’ mentorship until you feel well enough to mentor someone on your own, using your personal narrative of recovery as a way to demonstrate that going dry and taking it “one day at a time” truly is a workable strategy. That you really can “let go and let God” even after fucking up every possible portion of your life, no matter what your own particular version of a higher power might actually turn out to be.

Dan gets a job in a hospice, where he finds himself using his shining to comfort dying patients as they transition; the residents call him “Doctor Sleep,” a combination of his mother Wendy’s old nickname for (“Doc”) and the fact that his help allows them to slip away as if finally falling asleep. The kid Dan ends up mentoring, meanwhile, is Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), gifted with powers considerably greater than his ever were — powers that allow her to reach out and find him whenever she feels lonely enough to need a friend inside her mind, imaginary or not. Unfortunately for Abra, however, those same powers have attracted the attention of the True Knot, a nomadic group of former small-s “shiners” who’ve substantially increased their lives and powers by bonding themselves together psychically in a way which requires them to prey on similarly special children, torturing them to death and consuming the “steam” (life-force? Soul-force?) produced by their pain. Their leader, Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) is a glamorous vagabond combination of Stevie Nicks and Elizabeth Bathory, a sunburnt vampire queen with cold silver eyes who embodies all the naughty thrills of addiction with none of the apparent drawbacks. “Indulge yourself, no hangovers,” she tempts Dan, eventually. “Live long…eat well.” Her passion is only skin-deep, however, barely covering a roaring emptiness that bends her almost godlike mental powers towards nothing but an eternal, boringly repetitious cycle of hunt, feed, repeat — nothing higher, nothing more lasting. Which is why even an old drunk like adult Dan Torrance can blow her off, once he knows he’s got something worth fighting for.

As must be pretty clear by now, I enjoyed the hell out of Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, in both its Theatrical and Director’s Cuts. Yes, it goes full King sentimental here and there (“You shine on, Abra Stone,” etc.), but I think most people will respond to the way it manages to humanize both Dan’s and Jack’s struggles against the urge to blunt their sense of just how awful the world can be for people who — for no reason they have anything to do with — just happen to have been born with a capacity to see, know, and feel too much. A speech Dan has after receiving his three-year AA chip makes me cry every time I watch it, as Dan describes his adventures in getting drunk and beating people up as being “the only way I could get to know him [Jack],” at least before this moment of understanding that his father had also once been a man with a chip in his hand, hoping that job he’d just taken as the Overlook’s winter caretaker would lead to redemption and regrowth rather than a slow plunge back into the worst version of himself.

Much later, this is echoed when Dan takes Abra to the Overlook, hoping to use the abandoned hotel and its starving ghosts as weapons against Rose the Hat, a trap she’ll be to arrogant not to step into; he walks into the ballroom hoping to “wake it up” only to find Jack waiting for him behind the bar, so completely subsumed into the Overlook’s hierarchy that he no longer remembers anything about his real life and is unable to recognize his own son. It isn’t until Dan finally gets him to swig the drink he’s constantly trying to palm off him that Jack’s ghost seems to come back to himself, monologuing about how alcohol can wipe away the stresses of being a man, a father, a provider, in words Dan recognizes having used himself: “It’s medicine, that’s what it is…the mind’s a blackboard, and this is the eraser. So, pup, are ya gonna take your medicine?”

The thing I’ve always found hardest to love about Kubrick’s The Shining is Jack Nicholson’s entire performance, which never even vaguely manages to convince me that Jack Torrance cares enough about repairing his relationship with his wife and child to go dry until spring — for me, he’s extra from the get-go, openly contemptuous of of those he supposedly loves even in scenes as early as that conversation he has with Danny about the Donner Party during their drive up to the hotel (“See, Wendy, it’s okay…he saw it [cannibalism] on the television!”). And granted, we all bring what we’re already trying to process to any scenario, but for me, the crux of the book and its enduring popularity lies in Danny’s realization that his parents are people with problems of their own and no one’s coming to save him just because it’s so unfair for him to be put in this situation in the first place, versus Jack’s realization that no matter how hard he may have tried not to, he is indeed going to turn into his father: a drunk, an abuser, an intellectual bully, an authoritarian fraud.

King’s Jack enters the Overlook already having endangered his life and his family, but determined to write his way out of this mess he’s in — firm in his belief that his talent will be the thing which sets him apart and redeems him, halt his inevitable slippage from middle class to working poor, mend the break of trust between he, Danny and Wendy. Instead, the hotel subsumes him, tempts him with the things he wants most (alcohol, revenge, fame) and makes it impossible for him to escape his own baser instincts. Like the furnace below, “it creeps,” and it’s far too late for Jack to escape by the time he realizes exactly how ruined he actually is. The most he can do is try to make sure Danny gets out alive, and that Danny knows Jack loves him…a subtext which Nicholson appears to be disinterested in communicating, and Kubrick appears to have discarded fairly early on, but which Flanagan accepts as integral to any sort of narrative that brings an adult Dan Torrance literally face to face with all the things that haunt him.

The Theatrical Cut of Doctor Sleep runs two and a half hours, while the Director’s Cut clocks in at a cool three — and aside from the inclusion of a bunch of inserted title cards dividing the film into “chapters,” most of the differences between the two simply boil down to restoring deft cuts made to already-existing scenes. (How’d Dan get from the city to that small town? Took a bus. How much does Rose the Hat want to eat Abra’s steam? A LOT.) And while neither, frankly, are as bleakly terrifying as Kubrick’s Shining, both are more than worth your investment — a pair of tight, smart supernatural thrillers, emotionally engaging and physically beautiful, which serve to extend and (in my opinion) deepen a narrative many viewers will already find themselves attached to. Hell, you don’t even have to be the child of an alcoholic to enjoy them, though it helps.

All movie stills are from IMDB.com.