Doctor Sleep Reviews

To be honest, when I heard that they were coming up with a sequel for ‘The Shining’, it did sound like a really misguided idea. On the other hand, Mike Flanagan is at the moment one of the most interesting horror film directors so maybe he could make it work. Unfortunately, even though it did receive Stephen King‘s blessing and had received some decent reviews, it still turned out to be a flop at the box-office. Anyway, since the damned thing was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even if it never came near the level of Kubrick’s masterpiece (even if it is not even near to be one of my favourite movies from this great master, it is still one of the best horror movies ever made), this sequel was still not bad at all. Indeed, the links with Kubrick’s movie were actually well done but still allowed the movie to stand on its own. However, if ‘The Shining’ was really focused (at least, the way the story was told in Kubrick’s movie), I thought this new tale was just too scattered. I mean, I did appreciate how they handled the main character, Dan Torrance, Ewan McGregor definitely delivered a solid performance and this storyline worked rather well. However, there were also two other storylines, one involving another young girl with some very powerful shining and a group of rather obscure bad guys, and, in my opinion, they really struggled to combine these 3 stories together. Above all, everything involving the True Knot was very often way too opaque and even borderline ridiculous. Indeed, this group was actually really poorly defined and it didn’t help that more than half of them didn’t do or say anything at all through the whole duration. On the other hand, I have to admit that Rebecca Ferguson was actually seriously charismatic and maybe it would have better worked if she would have been on her own. In this case, you would have had 3 stories thread each involving only one main character creating a better balance. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was a decent watch though and I think it is worth a look but there is no denying it was still a rather useless sequel.