Polygon argues that Mike Flanagan’s 2019 film Doctor Sleep remains an exceptionally effective Stephen King adaptation because it successfully follows both King’s novel The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s influential 1980 film. The sequel matters, the article says, because it reconciles elements King disliked in Kubrick’s version with the imagery and atmosphere audiences admired.

Doctor Sleep follows the adult Danny Torrance as he helps Abra, a young girl with similar psychic abilities, escape Rose the Hat and the True Knot, who prey on people with “the shining”. King wrote the Doctor Sleep novel 36 years after The Shining, and told Entertainment Weekly that Flanagan’s script redeemed everything he had disliked about Kubrick’s adaptation; Flanagan had previously adapted King’s Gerald’s Game in 2017.