country road,” and he’s right. The scrap
between the leading teams is surreal as
well as punchy, with the Ford and the
Ferrari hurtling between green fields,
so close to each other that the drivers
can swap snarls. Even now, for all the
snap of the editing, we feel that we’re
watching a character study strapped into
an action flick. “Drive like you mean it”
is Miles’s motto, and here, in France, he
means business. Not the business of the
Ford Motor Company, or the cramped
Oedipal dealings of its chief, but the
more pressing business of being Ken
Miles, to the max.
There are only two downsides to this
bracing tale. One, it could use a trim; the
clash between our dynamic heroes and
the stiff suits in the boardroom doesn’t
need to be hammered home. And, two,
strangely, Mangold misses a trick. The
car developed by Shelby, and piloted by
Miles, is the GT40. All that concerns
them, understandably, is its pace and its
powers of endurance, and when, beside
the grid at Le Mans, they spot the Fer-
raris, resplendent in their scarlet plum-
age, Miles remarks, “If this were a beauty
pageant, we just lost.” Not so. The GT40
was the most beautiful—some would say
the only beautiful—creature ever to bear
the badge of Ford, and certainly the only
one that could look a Ferrari in the head-
lamps and not blink. Le Mans ’66 was
never merely a matter of speed and pride;
it was also, in retrospect, a contest to rav-
ish the eye. If you can’t make that clear
in a major motion picture, where can you?
A
man walks into a hotel. “Wakey,
wakey,” he says. The lights come
on. He descends to the basement and
fires up the boiler, then takes a tour of
the rooms. The door to one of the bath-
rooms bears a jagged hole, through
which the man shows his anxious face.
He seems to know his way around. It’s
almost as if he’s been here before.
The man is Danny Torrance (Ewan
McGregor), the hotel is the Overlook,
and the movie is Mike Flanagan’s “Doc-
tor Sleep,” a sequel of sorts to Stanley
Kubrick’s “The Shining.” It’s been nearly
forty years since we saw Danny, then a
small boy, flee from his axe-wielding fa-
ther, Jack, through a snowbound maze.
After such trauma, it’s no wonder that
the intervening decades have been un-
kind to Danny, leaving him soused in
alcohol and beached in gloom. Bravely,
he strives to remake himself, quitting
the bottle and taking a room in a small
New Hampshire town. He even gets a
job in a hospice. One thing he hasn’t
lost is the shine—the ability to peer into
the minds of others, including fright-
ened souls at their last gasp.
Meanwhile, a gang of predators stalk
the land. “They eat screams and drink
pain,” we learn, and their commander is
Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson): a
dandy, a wit, and a practiced murderess.
We observe their handiwork, and it’s all
gore and gloat; one sequence, involving
the torment of a child, strikes me as dra-
matically inexcusable. Their crimes are
tracked, from afar, by a telepathic teen-
ager named Abra (Kyliegh Curran),
whose shining is of the brightest kind—
“like G.P.S. but in my head,” as she puts
it. She uses it to locate Danny, and to
share her findings with him. Together,
they go to meet the evil face to face.
Fans of the original film love to pry
into its every nook, with a wild surmise
as to Kubrick’s intentions. (The 2012
documentary “Room 237” offers a di-
verting survey of such theories.) The
sequel serves up plenty for specialists
to chew on, not least a Jack Nicholson
look-alike—insofar as that’s possible—
behind the hotel bar, yet these semi-
reconstructions betray an odd sense of
superfluity and strain. The movie de-
mands that the adult Danny pay a visit
to old haunts, but does he really need to?
“Doctor Sleep” reminds me of another
follow-up, “Blade Runner 2049” (2017),
being drawn out, dutiful toward its source,
and so disconsolate, at times, that it verges
on the depressing. There’s also a lack of
geographic focus; whereas Kubrick homed
in on the Overlook and pretty much
stayed there, Flanagan’s film is all over
the place, crossing restively from state
to state. Rose can even travel above the
clouds, in a disembodied trance. (So why
does she have to arrive at the finale by
car?) Luckily, Ferguson is fabulous in the
role. She and Curran take possession of
the tale and save it with sprightliness;
their smiles arise without warning. I only
wish that Rose had been around when
Jack Torrance was on the rampage. What
a lovely couple they’d have made. NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.