Doctor Sleep

Look Before You Sleep

Doctor Sleep
2019 USA Directed by Mike Flanagan
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Contains spoilers for the original novel of Doctor Sleep.

Doctor Sleep is a pretty good film but I’m really surprised that Stephen King himself, the author of this sequel to his earlier book The Shining, has endorsed it. It’s not a secret that King hated Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of The Shining (reviewed by me here) because of the way it differed from the novel and there are two reasons why I would have thought that King would have been equally damning of this new movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep. One is that the last third of the movie is nothing like the last third of the original book (which I reviewed here). It takes so many more liberties with the text than Kubrick did on his adaptation of The Shining and the ending is completely changed. That in itself would have been something he would be quite critical of, I’d have thought but you also have to factor in that director Mike Flanagan (who directed the wonderful Absentia, which I reviewed here) has deliberately synched it in visually, in a lot of it, to Kubrick’s version of The Shining... which King hated. So, yeah, puzzled but happy, at least, that the famous horror novelist is finally recognising a good movie, albeit a slightly flawed version of his original novel here.

So lets get to it then.

The film will give fans of Kubrick’s original chills right from the opening Warner Brothers logo, as the Newton Brothers recreate the first few bars of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s opening title variation of the Deus Irae from The Shining before they go into their own thing. The film starts off not long after the original and we get some scenes showing Danny and his mother after the events of that film. These two don’t look as much like the original actors as you might like but they’ve done their best to make them look like variations of what they might look like at that point in time. Then the movie picks up speed and jumps to Ewan McGregor playing a grown up version of the first film’s/novel’s central child protagonist Danny Torrance, first in the scene where he wakes up in a woman’s bed in full ‘morning after’ mode and, then, as he ends up in New Hampshire and is helped back into both employment and into the local alcoholics anonymous group by his new friend Billy (played here by Cliff Curtis). We also get background on the group of antagonists called The Knott, headed up by Rebecca Ferguson as Rose The Hat.

The film then jumps forward another eight years and carries on with the story of the novel for a good way, building up the tension in The Knott but precluding them systematically dying from measles due to contaminated steam (steam is basically their name for the essence found inside people who ‘shine’). So we get them noticing the young girl protagonist Abra (who has a powerful version of ‘the shining’ in her and who is played by Kyliegh Curran here) and we get Abra’s psychic relationship with Danny reaching the point that, after she psychically witnesses the slow murder and absorption of a kid at the hands of The Knott, she seeks Danny out in real life and the two ultimately hatch a plan to put a stop to The Knott before The Knott can find and kill them too.

Then, around about the point where The Knott spring a trap set by Danny, Abra and Billy, the film deviates massively from the original novel in a lot of ways. Although the last battle takes place in the grounds of the Overlook Hotel it’s only Rose in that final battle and not a big battle royale with a large portion of The Knott. Also, in the book the Overlook is no longer there and The Knott have their campsite in the ruins. In the movie, Danny and Abra lure Rose to the still standing Overlook Hotel for their final showdown. There are other characters that make more appearances than they did in the novel too and, frankly, the number of survivors of ‘the good guys’ and the specific people still left standing at the end is completely different. It is like watching a new story from this point on.

It all looks and sounds fabulous though. The performances by McGregor, Ferguson and Curran are brilliant and Curtis give solid support as Billy. In fact, there really isn’t a bad performance in this movie. Even Alex Essoe, who takes over from Shelley Duvall as Danny’s mum Wendy, does a good job here... especially since she doesn’t look all that like the original actress (the same could perhaps be said of whoever they’ve got playing Jack Torrance in lieu of Jack Nicholson here... I can’t find out who plays him in this as the Internet seems somehow shrouded in mystery about him right now).

The last third features a lot more Stanley Kubrick references (pitching in with the references at the opening of the film) and it’s a fun time if you’re an admirer of the Kubrick picture. Some of the sets and shot set ups have been recreated (and that’s down to the sound design too) but, nice as they are to look at, it’s all a bit of a strange mix up. For instance, in the novel, Jack Torrance makes an appearance right at the end in a rescue/redemption moment. Here that’s gone and the scene and necessity for his appearance is also not here... instead, Flanagan tries to shoehorn the character into a much bigger role and... honestly, it doesn’t work that well here, I think. Also, the character’s effect on Danny and the subsequent chase scene is... well it’s a bit laboured, it seems to me.

However, the party guests, the brief reappearance of the twins and other things are done pretty well.  One cameo and set up for the new denouement which people who haven’t read King’s The Shining may find puzzling is also strangely mixed in here and, like I said, if you have only seen Stanley’s take on the story, then it might seem like a really clumsy 'deus ex machina' moment. I’m talking about the boiler in the Overlook Hotel... I’m not going to say much about it here other than to remind readers that, in the original novel The Shining, it played a huge role... and I’m saying that bearing in mind that I haven’t read the novel since the late 1970s/early 1980s but, yeah, even I can remember the boiler room being a big thing in the book. So, yeah, Flanagan and co bring that back in to the mix but, like I said, it’s going to seem like a really sloppy addition if you haven't read The Shining.

The cinematography is all good though and the music from the Newton Brothers gets back nearer to the soundscape of The Shining soundtrack once you get into the last third. Honestly, there’s a series of shots which come just after the film really starts deviating from the book and I was kinda expecting them to happen and I was thinking, I hope they remember to properly use Carlos and Elkind’s Deus Irae here again... yeah, they do and although the sequence of shots is much, much shorter than the original ones the director is parodying (and shot at night in this instance), it does feel good when this little moment comes.

And that’s me done on this one I think. I hate the new ending as I thought the one in the book was perfect and, frankly, if King ever gets it into his head to write a third novel in that sequence, the movie studios are going to surely find it hard to adapt it after the big U-Turn ending this film takes. That being said, in spite of all these terrible changes plus the overuse of a character who would have been much better left as the brief but weighty appearance he has in the novel, I still thoroughly enjoyed the ride on this one and will certainly be grabbing the Blu Ray when this one gets released. UK fans of the score may want to know that there’s a CDR release of it on US Amazon which they’ll ship to the UK, if you want to hear the music properly rather than attempt to listen to a disappointing and compressed electronic download. Looking forward to giving that one a spin when it finally arrives in the mail. Anyway, Doctor Sleep is definitely something you should see if you liked the Kubrick version of The Shining but please don’t expect something close to the book... there are some wild deviations here.

Before I Wake

Am Mad Butterfly

Before I Wake
USA 2016 Directed by Mike Flanagan
Intrepid Pictures German Blu Ray Zone B 

I don’t know how I managed to miss this one last year.

I first became aware of  Before I Wake earlier in the year when Varese Sarabande released a very limited pressing of the score on CD. Since it was by The Newton Brothers and had themes by Danny Elfman, I figured I’d pick it up in advance of the inevitable cinema release of the film. However, I then started wandering the internet and realised that it had already been out at the cinema in this country... according to the IMDB it got released in the UK in April of 2016 so, since I like the odd horror movie or two, I am surprised I totally missed this one when it came out. Especially since it was written and directed by Mike Flanagan.

Flanagan is someone who I have a weak track record with at the moment. I saw his Occulus movie with Karen Gillan (which also had a cool score by The Newton Brothers) and I wasn’t much impressed. Nor was I tempted to go and see his prequel to the US version of Ouija after the original movie had been so dire (although I’m told Flanagan’s movie is pretty good). I did, however, love one of his first features, Absentia (which I reviewed here) and so once I’d found out this was by him, I felt on more familiar territory than when I watched the trailer... which makes the film look like a glorified version of that old tale, The Monkey’s Paw. Which it kinda is, actually, with just a little more window dressing.

I ordered a German Blu Ray for the princely sum of £6 because the UK doesn’t have a Blu Ray release of this yet and, if the marketing of this movie continues in the way it has, I doubt if we could expect one anytime soon, either.

The film itself stars Kate Bosworth as Jessie and Thomas Jane as Mark, a bereaved mother and father who have lost their only child, a son, in a freak drowning accident in their bathtub. So they have decided to adopt a child, which is where their new foster son Cody, played by Jacob Tremblay, enters the picture. Cody has had a number of troubled placements with previous families and we already get more than a hint of just how troubled they were from a pre-credits sequence showing one of the previous foster fathers going to shoot Cody dead in bed.

Now, one of the nice things about this movie is that there are no twists around the corner for you to puzzle over and, inevitably, be disappointed in when you get them an hour before the end of the piece. Instead, everything is up front and out in the open so it’s not that long before Cody, who tries to stay up without falling asleep every day and night, falls asleep and the things of his dreams are manifested to those closest to him, in this case his new foster parents. At the start this seems a benign gift rather than the curse it appears to be later... he dreams of beautifully colourful butterflies and they appear to Jessie and Mark until he wakes up. After a few more nights of this strange behaviour where he gets more surreal in his dreaming of the butterflies as his impression of them grows (there’s a nice scene with brightly coloured ‘light bulb butterflies’, for example), things start to get a little out of hand as he dreams up Jessie and Mark’s dead son. Rather than report all this, though, in a stunning display of unbelievable stupidity from the central protagonists, the couple decide to accept these occurrences as fairly normal, rather than go through the obvious denial and evidence gathering stage.

Mark realises, after a few visitations, that it’s not really his dead son but Cody’s imagination toppling out of his mind. Jessie, however, wants to carry on with theses manifestations so she gets a doctor to prescribe her child some sleeping pills for the evening. Alas, what she doesn’t know is that Cody also has a monster that eats people living in his head and it's this which brings the peril right into Jessie and Mark’s house....

And that’s as far as I going with the story set up, other than it’s got no twist ending (as I said earlier) and it’s a fairly straight forward arc to the end, especially when it strays away from that Monkey’s Paw angle a little. Another thing that’s nice about it in terms of the story is that, although it’s not particularly twisted or unpredictable, it does do a couple of things at certain points which are not the usual things you would see in a cosy, American horror movie. There are genuine sacrifices made by the characters at specific moments and that gives the film a lift in certain places where, honestly, it sometimes needs them.

The only weakness I could find was the muffled and unrealistic reaction the main adult protagonists have on finding out their new foster son dreams things alive but if you are okay with this, then some of the surreal imagery, like the two light bulb butterflies who swarm together with many others and become the demonic eyes of some nightmare creature, are quite rewarding. Also, the director resists the usual Hollywood horror fetish of constantly moving the camera around like you’re on a roller coaster ride. There are loads of static or extremely slow tracked/panned/zoomed shots in this and it gives the film a nice leisurely pace. Whether that’s necessarily a good thing for a horror movie to possess is something which is perhaps better left for another discussion but it makes a change from some of the other stuff you see in modern horror movies so I felt this was a good move.

And yes, the score by The Newton Brothers and Danny Elfman is pretty good as a stand alone lesson and certainly appropriate as you get into the movie. Again, it’s not ‘quite’ your typical horror movie scoring sessions here although, as I’ve said a few times above, it does have its moments.

Before I Wake is not the best Mike Flanagan movie I’ve seen, for sure. Absentia still takes my number one spot in terms of that. It is, however, fairly good fun and if you like low key horror movies with not too many scares (it has to be said) but a nice tone and some inventive creations thrown in, then this is probably a film you’ll be okay with. I’m now wondering if it’s time I tried to find this director’s other feature that I haven’t seen before, Hush. Maybe I’ll try to catch up with that one next.

Oculus

Oculus Riffed

Oculus
2013 USA
Directed by Mike Flanagan
Playing at UK cinemas now.

When I first sat down to write this review, I was going to call it Bin-Oculus... but then I decided I couldn’t be so mean spirited to something where the director, cast and crew have obviously all worked very hard on a genre tale which is, at the very least, quite competently put together... a hell of a lot more than some of the ones I’ve seen over the years, I can assure you. However, having let this film lay in my memory overnight I have to come to the sobering conclusion that, while Oculus certainly isn’t a terrible movie.... it’s not exactly a classic either.

The film is based on a short horror movie by the same director called Oculus: Chapter 3 - The Man With The Plan and, although I haven’t seen that earlier film myself, I’m guessing that the subject matter, and the way the story is spun out, probably carries a lot more impact in its original Twilight Zone sized format than it does expanded out to a feature. In many ways, that’s the film’s main problem, which I think the writer/director probably recognised very early on and is what gives the film its specific structure... but I’ll get to that in a minute.

There are some good things about this movie. Karen Gillan is one of them.

She is and always has been, the person you look at when she is on screen. To say this lady has some screen presence is a massive understatement and she is a big positive for any film or TV show she is in. In this case, though, that doesn’t matter because, frankly, all the performances are pretty good, including the child actor and actress who play the brother and sister leads for half the movie in the back story. And if the prospect of having the aforementioned Doctor Who actress in the movie isn’t enough to get any sci-fi fan’s pulse racing, we have the added attraction here of Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica TV show, playing her mum. So this is all good stuff.

And, to be honest, the central concept of a haunted mirror which causes madness, death and destruction to the owners of any house in which it resides is also a good one. I think, as I said earlier, the structure of this one is a problem in some ways... not that the director's solution isn’t a good one, I just don’t think it worked too well here in terms of scares. A bit of a wasted concept.

It’s a story of two halves, you see. Being both a contemporary story of siblings Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and Tim (Brenton Thwaites), who are trying to end the mirror because of what it has done to them in the past, and the story of that past with their younger selves played by Annalise Basso and Garrett Ryan. Rather than play out as two separate elements, since they are obviously both lengthy sections, the director wisely decides to cross-cut between the two which also, of course, gives him the added bonus of highlighting things happening in one time zone with things happening in the other, as seen in contrast to each other. Which also gives him the obvious option of bleeding each reality into the other and he grasps that opportunity with both hands and utilises it in an attempt to manipulate the audience’s emotions. However, at least in terms of this disappointed audience member, in that last thing he fails to some considerable degree.

I know this because, throughout the whole movie, I didn’t find this one scary. I was expecting to get a taut, white knuckle ride of emotional jumps out of this film... which a lot of the modern ghost stories seem to be getting much better at, in my opinion. However, I knew this one wasn’t pulling me in like it was supposed to because I wasn’t getting that concerned about any of the central protagonists and I even, and this is really annoying, found myself checking the time three quarters of the way through to find out when this one was going to end. Not good.

I think one of the reasons this thing maybe isn’t working, aside from the structure meaning it takes a long time to get on with things, is due to two other elements.

One of these is that the film is just too damn predictable. It telegraphs the ending of one of the characters, for example, within the first 20 minutes or so of the opening of the film. That is to say, one of the characters sets a kill switch, a sure fire way of ending the mirror should things get too out of control. Which is kinda nice but, frankly, anyone who hasn’t figured out that at least one person is going to fall victim to the trap hasn’t watched enough movies in their lifetime. It’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen at the end of the movie and the only thing you really have to worry about, or not in my case, is just who is going to “get it” by being snared in their own trap.

It’s not all, completely predictable, though. Just mostly. The structure becomes quite freeform due to the rules set up in the movie by the “ghostly properties” of the mirror and there’s one sequence where a certain thing, involving a pet dog, is used to set up audience expectation which it then refutes... except, oh no it doesn’t, you just share the confused perception of the characters, as it turns out... so you might, as I was, feel a little bit cheated by the off screen nature of that particular reveal, or lack of reveal in this case.

Which leads me to why I really couldn’t care less what was going on in the movie after a certain point, even with some fantastic portrayals by the actors and actresses involved. And it is this...

At a certain point in the movie, fairly early on, we are taught, along with the main protagonists, that the reality of the movie is not necessarily how we are perceiving it at any one time. That physical laws are unstable and subject to change because anybody in the film could be hallucinating anything that’s going on, including their physical location. This means, basically, the film can do whatever it wants and lie to us visually as much as it likes... but it doesn’t matter what it does because there is no consequence to anything we are seeing. What will be will be... regardless of what reality we think we are experiencing. This, of course, has the effect of taking the sting out of the tail of the film... the movie can do what it wants to with the characters and it doesn’t have any influence on their ultimate fate... so, naturally, you stop caring about them and having a stake in their survival. What you’re seeing at any one time could always just be the mirror lying to you... so what does it matter? It felt like the horror element of the story got de-toothed long before it had properly started... so I had no investment in the way the images and sounds were presented to me... they were just something washing past my retina which didn’t really mean much.

However, having said all that, the film is generally nice to look at, with some smoothly flowing camerawork and some nice visual ideas. The introduction of Karen Gillan’s grown up version of Kaylie, for instance, which focuses on the movement of her big, red pony tail, made me smile in delight as I watched the movie. A predictable little sequence involving a light bulb and an apple is, similarly, well executed. And the score too, by The Newton Brothers, is nicely done as an appropriate but, quite typical, example of modern scoring for the horror genre. So that’s all good and I’ve got the CD on in the background as I write this review.

That being said, I really can’t find a lot of really good things to say about this movie and, my moans about structure and visual trickery aside, I really can’t say much of anything too bad about it either... except that on a “scary horror movie” level, for me it just doesn’t really work that well. Can’t say I could recommend it for fans of the horror genre but I can recommend it for anyone interested in following Karen Gillan’s post Doctor Who career because, as I’d expected, she does a great job in this movie and they should put her in a lot more of them, methinks. Also, the concept itself isn’t bad and the director/joint writer may be one to keep an eye out for in the future... we might see some seriously good stuff from him before long, methinks. All in all, though, I have to say I had a bit of a dull time with Oculus and I’m not expecting to watch it again in the future, to be honest.