Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Carel Struycken, Jacob Tremblay, Emily Alyn Lind, Zahn McClarnon, Cliff Curtis, Bruce Greenwood, Chelsea Talmadge, Alex Essoe, Carl Lumbly, Joclin Donahue, Catherine Parker, Seleena Anduze, Kyliegh Curran, Robert Longstreet, Nicholas Pryor, Bethany Anne Lind, Kaitlyn McCormick, Marc Farley, Molly Jackson, Kk Heim, Zachary Momoh, Roger Dale Floyd, Shane Brady.
There are few actors that can act Jack Nicholson off the screen, and perhaps none that can capture the delight of madness, of insanity, that he has brought to a number of roles in his long and distinguished career. To even try to attain the same depth of the unravelling of the mind that the actor sought in the 1980 cinema release of Stephen King’s The Shining is to arguably fall, to know that such performances only ever really come once, never to be repeated.
That in a way is the point of Doctor Sleep. A narrative that continues the idea of isolation and the demons that inhabit the mind when there is no way to block out the receptors of the calling of evil, or that in particular of Danny Torrance’s ability; it is keeping yourself isolated, from humanity that perhaps we place ourselves in the greatest of dangers.
Whilst Ewan McGregor brings the sense of fragility to the role of Danny Torrance that is worthy of Stephen King’s novel, it is to Rebecca Ferguson as the malevolent Rose the Hat that brings Doctor Sleep to life, a manifestation of that humanity clinging onto the vestiges of life by taking the essence of others with Dan Torrance and Kyliegh Curran’s Abra Stone’s ability.
The earnestness of Ms. Ferguson’s performance matches anything the actor has done before, and indeed the role itself could have been directly written for her; such is the display of anger, of hatred and wickedness that is rolled up in the smile of a ghoulish predator, that it is hard to think of any other who could have portrayed the leader of the True Knot with the same conviction.
Stephen King famously decries Stanley Kubrik’s 1980 version of The Shining, and yet has its plaudits, the iconic nature of Jack Nicholson’s performance can never be spoken too highly of and whilst Doctor Sleep veers away from that sense of injustice and fear felt by the viewer as they refresh their memory of the Overlook Hotel and the malice keenly observed, Doctor Sleep prowls a territory that in itself is just as frightening, the abduction and senseless murder of those with a gift just to sustain the lives of others.
An acceptable adaption of what is in effect a fine story by the master of 20th and 21st Century horror, one that won’t strike home with the same drama as The Shining, but none the less feeds on the darkness in us all.
Ian D. Hall