Movies
[Review] Mike Flanagan’s ‘Doctor Sleep’ is a Beautiful, Shining Horror Masterpiece
The sheer overwhelming gall it must take to direct a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – as vaunted a horror masterpiece as any committed to celluloid – is probably only measurable in tonnage. But not only did Mike Flanagan pull it off, he’s made a masterfully horrifying motion picture in its own right. Doctor Sleep is a stunning and frightening film about trauma and substance abuse, it’s a worthy successor to The Shining, and as if that weren’t enough, it’s also a complex work of thoughtful film criticism.
Stephen King’s original novel for The Shining was adapted rather loosely into Kubrick’s 1980 film. In both versions, the Torrance family – Jack (Jack Nicholson), Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd) – venture to the Overlook Hotel in the dead of winter and fall prey to supernatural influences, which turn Jack against his family by preying on his weakness for alcohol. There were obvious deviations from the events of the novel, but perhaps the biggest difference is that Kubrick’s interpretation offers little sympathy to Jack Torrance and his personal plight. He was always a powder keg, and the Overlook Hotel lit his long fuse.
Doctor Sleep picks up decades later, when Danny, or rather “Dan” (Ewan McGregor), has fallen into the same pattern of substance abuse as his father. Hitting rock bottom, and only using his “Shining” when the demons from the Overlook come back to haunt him, he eventually finds some solace in a small town where his past is largely forgotten. He goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he takes a job working as an orderly at a nursing home, and his uncanny ability to tell which patients are about to die – and his lovely way of guiding them peacefully to their final rest – has earned him the nickname “Doctor Sleep.”
But Dan isn’t the only person in the world with powers, and a group of psychics who kill and feed off the shine of other people are roaming the country. Their prey is usually small children, and they constantly need a fix. Led by the aptly-titled Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson, who does indeed wear a hat) they chance upon a young girl named Abra Stone (newcomer Kyliegh Curran) who shines brighter than anyone else in the world. And the only way Abra could possibly survive is to contact her anonymous telepathic pen pal, Dan, and bring him back into the larger world of the supernatural, where he can finally face his fears – and the legacy of “The Shining” – once and for all.
Doctor Sleep impeccably recreates scenes from Kubrick’s The Shining, but smartly reframes them as young Danny’s perspective on those shocking events. The original film is effectively Dan’s tragic, traumatic memories of his father’s rampage, without any of the sympathetic context King afforded Jack Torrance in his original story. Dan’s own journey through substance abuse is now a way, unhealthy though it obviously is, to connect to his father on a level he never could when Jack was still alive.
Flanagan, who also adapted the screenplay, insidiously keeps Kubrick’s film canonical while making room for King’s original vision. Although that does require Flanagan to make major changes to Doctor Sleep’s plot, the adjustments create a space where this new film can explore the legacy of Kubrick’s The Shining, its connections to King’s larger literary tradition, and the very nature of adaptation itself. Revisions and reinterpretations do not, in Flanagan’s world, annihilate original texts. Every version of The Shining illuminates the same tale from new angles, including this one.
Of course, Doctor Sleep isn’t a typical sequel. It uses The Shining as a launching point but weaves an extremely different tale. The action sprawls across America and yet the story stays intimate, focused entirely on Dan, Abra and Rose as their paths begin to gradually cross. There’s death, there’s carnage, there’s even a shoot out, but there are too many possibilities in Doctor Sleep’s universe for the film to rigidly follow just one genre and feel satisfying. There are moments when it’s clearly a nightmare-driven haunted house film, moments when it’s a character-driven drama about addiction, and moments when it’s a mythology-driven expansion of the world King merely hinted at in the original.
Those elements could have been formless, and by all rights it could even have been dull, but cinematographer Michael Fimognari (The Haunting of Hill House) keeps finding new ways to make simple moments dynamic and let familiar images from The Shining get under our skin in whole new ways. Director Mike Flanagan also edits the movie, and impressively keeps the pacing brisk while giving the story and characters all the space they need to push the story forward organically, with their understandable choices, and never with cheap cinematic artifice.
The film evokes Kubrick’s aesthetic without becoming entirely Kubrickian. The director of The Shining created clinical and objective spaces for his characters to act in, and reveal their true selves to the watchful world. The director of Doctor Sleep tweaks that shooting style and tilts the camera as necessary, bringing us inside of the cast’s heads into their psyches.
The cast is a treasure. Ewan McGregor owns his vulnerability and turns it into shaky strength. Rebecca Ferguson gives an upsettingly cruel performance, driven by selective morality and cunning. Kyliegh Curran makes a rare debut, full of complex inner turmoil and young, godlike power. And the supporting cast is full of surprises, creating an impressive ensemble of characters both familiar and novel, whether they have one scene or a large number.
It’s dense, it’s complicated, it’s haunting. Is it scary? Not as much as The Shining, but that’s a high bar, and the result of a unique environment. The Shining was a film borne of elegant simplicity, a family in a haunted house, which evoked universal anxieties about addiction, abuse, mental illness, in the grand old tradition of the classical ghost story. Doctor Sleep isn’t a conventional horror movie. It dances from genre to genre, grabbing you and dragging you from one beautiful and horrifying scene to another. It may not keep you up at night wondering what each strange noise is, but it may keep you up at night marveling at how it felt, what it all means… and whether The Shining will ever again be the same.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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