Doctor Sleep (2019)

Mike Flanagan is one of my favorite directors, but Stephen King adaptations are cursed to nearly always be awful. He managed to make Gerald's Game tolerable, so there's hope, but the King curse is strong. It all depends on how well the story can be translated into soliloquies. Very few of Flanagan's regulars act in this one, not even his wife, which isn't a good sign either. Apparently it's a sequel to The Shining, which is a really bad sign.

Most of the cast debuts for the first green-tinted flashback scene to eat flowers and steal children and drive away in their RVs.

We flash forward to modern times, I suppose, where a little kid is having a nightmare that he's the little kid from The Shining peddling around the hotel. You shouldn't let young children watch horror movies, I guess. He awakens into the bathtub scene from The Shining, before finally awakening again into his normal life where his concerned mother lets us know that he's temporarily mute. Mom seems concerned about the bathroom, though, and when she opens the door in a hurry there are two wet old lady footprints still visible in the bath mat.

The mute kid goes to the park, where the hotel chef from The Shining teleports onto his bench and chatters at him. So this is literally supposed to be the kid from The Shining, not some other kid dreaming about it. The chef speaks inside his brain, and suddenly the kid starts talking. This is supremely stupid already. Stephen King, what the hell? The chef tells the kid that he needs to do some shining. "The world's a hungry place, and the darkest things are the hungriest, and they'll eat what shines." Chef talks a lot. Chef has to tell us the entire plot of The Shining, and its deeper meaning, and some extra lore and backstory. Unfortunately, Chef doesn't have what it takes to carry a movie alone on a soliloquy, and the kid can't act well at all. Chef gives him a little wooden box and tells him he needs to build the same box in his mind. Man, oh man.

The kid goes home and marches right into the bathroom with the naked old lady spirit, and there's screaming and a wooden box in a snowy forest, and then he marches out. I guess he's locked the demon in his shining mind box, or whatever. He goes back out to watch Looney Toons and speaks to his mom, and she doesn't even comment on how he's suddenly not mute.

Ewan McGregor, looking just like later Flanagan collaborator Mark Hamill, wakes up next to a naked woman in a rundown apartment and has stupid flashbacks about having a bar fight the night before. He tries to steal her money, but Chef appears in the room and calls him an asshole. Ewan tries to lock up a memory in a mind box, and Chef tells him he's not allowed to. This is beyond Dreamcatcher levels of stupidity.

In some other place, a couple goes downstairs and are confused to find their piano playing itself. Then we cut to a movie theater in New York where a john is meeting a prostitute, but she mutters sleep into his ear, he sleeps immediately, and the flower-eating woman from the first scene watches with excitement as the fake prositute robs him, calls him a pedo, and carves a symbol into his cheek with a pocket knife.

She walks out of Atlanta's Plaza Theater even though they're in "New York". The flower eaters grab her and her hypnotism doesn't work on them. This scene just bought them 10 more minutes to redeem themselves before I turn it off.

We cut to a magician at a child's birthday party, with the birthday girl insisting that she can also do magic. She levitates all of the spoons in the house and her parents frown because now they're going to have to send her to Professor Charles Xavier's Center for Children Who Can't Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too. Somewhere in the distance, a flower-eater turns around and smiles, and it tells us we're in "chapter two."

The flower-eater tells the kidnapped false-prostitute that she's a "pusher" and there haven't been "pushers" around for a while. The flower-eater promises the girl that she can age extra slowly by joining her stupidly named cult, "the true knot," with the dumb Game of Thrones knockoff slogan: "what's tied can never be untied." Carel Struycken, Twin Peaks' Fireman, leads the cult initiation chant on the beach, and they suck in the vaporized mist of the child they captured in the first scene.

Ewan McGregor, who is apparently homeless, meets one of those overly-understanding homeless savior characters who "get's a good feeling about people" and helps him rent a remarkably beautiful attic apartment. Ewan awakens from sleep with a dead woman's corpse clawing at him and saying something unintelligible about the zombie baby she's holding. So Ewan goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, run by Gerald from Gerald's Game, and reads Gerald's mind and tells him where he left his watch. These are all good actors, but the script is so mind-numbingly stupid that they have nothing to work with. Ewan goes to work as a janitor at Gerald's hospice, where they spend a long time explaining to us that the cat predicts who is going to die next. The dying old man calls Ewan "Doctor Sleep", and Ewan calms him down by talking to him telepathically. Oh, Ewan is The Shining kid all grown up! That wasn't obvious. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Chapter three opens in The Overlook hotel from The Shining, and then instantly stops being there. Now it's 8 years later and Ewan has shaved his beard and got an AA chip and gets to deliver a raspy soliloquy about his dead father, Jack Nicholson. He goes back to work, the next cat-selected dying guy calls him Doctor Sleep again, and Ewan uses his magic powers to help him recover his favorite memories as he dies. This guy gives shortened, less-interesting version of the "what happens when we die" speech from Midnight Mass.

Ewan writes messages to the spoon girl magically through the chalkboard on his attic wall. We're over an hour in and they're still being really cagey about what the plot is, or if there is one. Meanwhile, the child-eaters are complaining that child-steam isn't as strong as it used to be because of cell phones and netflix (no, seriously, I'm not making this up). He literally says "the world's not as steamy."

You know what, fuck it, I don't care what the plot is. Skipping to the last ten minutes, Ewan and the flower-eater girl are fucking around with typewriters and axes in the Overlook hotel. "You don't shine quite the same," she tells him. They have a brief axe battle, she throws down a flight of stairs, assisted by some wire-flying, and sucks the steam out of him while he has flashbacks to remakes of scenes from The Shining. The magic wooden boxes in his brain jump open and all of The Shining demons pop out and suck the flower-eater's steam out. Ewan stops bleeding to death from his femoral artery for no good reason. The demons turn on him, too. Spoon girl relives various The Shining scenes – accelerated – with zombified Ewan chasing her around in a Jack Nicholson impersonation. She defeats him with the power of love or something, and he blows himself and the building up in an anti-climactic CGI explosion. Ewan hangs around as a ghost to hang out with spoon girl and have a boring epilogue telling her, "woaaaah, heaven let your light shine down. I'm gonna let it shine, I'm gonna let it shine." Her mom asks her who she's talking to and she says, "nobody. Actually, Ewan McGregor and he says it's cool," and her mom nods and walks away.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. It is like Stephen King wrote shitty fanfic about his own novel; though I haven't read it, so maybe it's more that Kubrick successfully polished shit to an illustrious shine. I can only presume that Flanagan is such a fan of Kubrick's masterpiece that he was too blinded with excitement to realize what garbage this is. So bad, it makes Dreamcatcher seem Oscar-worthy.