Hooked

Chanced upon the film Doctor Sleep on Netflix yesterday and, highly unusually for me, just couldn't stop watching it. Didn't manage to view the full two and half hours on Monday, despite being hooked, since Noi also had something she wanted to watch, but watched to the end tonight. Happily I found I'd forgotten most of the plot of Steven King's excellent follow-on to The Shining, and even more happily I suspect the film-makers rightly had played fast and loose with it anyway. (My copy of the novel is on the shelves of Maison KL, so I can't do even a cursory check.)

In fact, the film draws as much on the Kubrick movie, it seemed to me, as it does on King's novel, especially in the final sequences in The Overlook. The result is that the mythic power of both the movie and King's earlier novel come together to powerful effect.

I don't think Doctor Sleep is a great movie (or a great novel, in its written incarnation) but it's a very, very good one. It lacks the monomaniacal obsessiveness of The Shining, which was a great movie (and a great novel). The supernatural apparatus of the Inner Knot (I think that's what the bad guys call themselves) is well done, but doesn't touch the mythic power of the Very Bad Place. But, having said that, the cast of DS are excellent and the lady playing Rosie the Hat is disturbingly sensational. Oh, and Ewan McGregor is note-perfect as the haunted Danny Torrance.