Doctor Sleep

Or: Devil with the Black Hat on

Your hero is only ever as great as their villain. It’s the machinations of evil that fuels the engine of your horror story, the adversary who turns the ignition. They don’t have to be alluring, they don’t have to be sympathetic, but they do have to to inspire a sense of awful (and awe-filled) fascination, and such a villain is Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). Leader of The True Knot, a pan-ethic, polyamorous, RV driving vampire cult, Rose leads her merry band on an eternal quest down the highways and back roads of civilization, hunt’n magic kids and eating their souls. With her soft Irish lilt, and soft devil-may-care step, her close relationship with her second Crow Daddy (the always excellent and subtle Zahn McClarnon) Rose is a warm, affectionate, and smiles like a kid in a bicycle rase as she digs her thumbs into somebody’s open wound.

The problem with the True Knot as presented in the source novel by Stephen King is that they’re too dished sympathetic. Sure they kill kids, gruesomely, and have done so for over a millennia, but unlike say The Overlook or Randall Flagg, they’re just looking for food. They have deep affections for each other, they’re queer friendly (sadly not underscored as much in the film). And they die too easily and with too much pathos. Here in Mike Flanagan’s film, the Knot, while still awaking ambivalent feelings of charm and skin crawly appreciation, exhibit teeth and draw a lot more blood.

As for our heroes, well, they are decent. Danny Torrence (Ewan McGregor) is trying his best to lead a decent life, keeping the specter of his father's Alcoholism, and the ghosts of the Overlook hotel out of his life, some with more success than others. Though committed to stay away from The Shining, the psychic powers that got him into such trouble when he was a kid, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran) a young girl with an even greater shine than his, who’s dead in the sights of the True Knot.

McGregor’s stoically tortured, keeping Danny’s anguish in his eyes and the set of his jaw, especially whenever drink comes near to cracking through everything he’s built to keep it out. Curran is even-keeled and cool (though she gets a nice scene when possessed by an older adult). Both are offset nicely by the unnerved side-eyes of Billy (Cliff Curtis) Danny’s best friend who tags along for the vampire hunt.

But the most exciting thing to report (apart from Ferguson making Yoga Pants and Eileen Fisher evil again) is how tight and yar an adaptation it is. Mike Flanagan has carried off a happy union of both King’s novel and Kubrick’s movie, giving the former a neat, streamlined retelling (and dining up its anticlimactic third act with oaths of enmity and ax fights) and giving the latter an ending it always deserved. He’s also granted us a fine script, that uses several monologues (a lost art in screenwriting) to great effect.

Add along some sweeping shots of towering mountains (with an orchestral take on the Overlook’s famous theme that spreads a rictus grin across the audience), flickering lights and the bone cracking motions of the True Knot, and you have yourself a smashing film (minus one subpar shopping clerk extra but I’m sure they're pleasant in real life. That and when your villainess comes for our heroes, a torturous scream withdrawing into a chilling smile and you find yourself whispering “Go get ‘em, Rose.” (followed of course by “Nodidn’tmeanthatrunkindsrun!”), you know you’ve been snookered to an enchanting minima tic experience, that has you rooting for the devil.