Daring to propose a sequel to an absolute myth of horror cinema such as ‘The Shining’ demands arrests, but this proposal arrived in 2019 with a few quality certificates in tow. On the one hand, Stephen King himself wrote the novel on which this book is based. ‘Doctor Sleep’what just landed on HBO Max. So we have the permission of the child’s own father.
On the other, behind the cameras is a less than ideal director. Mike Flanagan has shown with literal adaptations like the complicated ‘Gerald’s Game’ or spiritual ones like the highly Kingian ‘Midnight Mass’ or ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ (all under the auspices of Netflix) that It is about a director fully in tune with the imaginary and discourse of the master of terror.
Here, Flanagan and King tell us how Dan Torrance, the child survivor of his father’s outrages in ‘The Shining’, tries to live with the weight of his clairvoyant powers. This is how he meets a young woman with powers similar to his own, whom he must protect from a sect known as the True Knot, whose members try to achieve immortality by vampirizing those who live with the Shining.
Flanagan poses a film very faithful to the book that also manages to reconcile with Kubrick’s film and make King’s novel and the hated (by the Maine writer) adaptation of the eighties coexist in the same universe. A different horror film, which shines thanks to the performances of Ewan McGregor and, above all, a great Rebecca Ferguson as a villain, and which has extraordinary dream sequences and astral projections.