A warm director in a cold hotel

Stephen King disliked what Kubrick did to his book and said so for forty years. Doctor Sleep is adapted from King's novel and shot inside Kubrick's film, which means Mike Flanagan took on an argument he did not start and could not win outright. That he gets as far as he does is the achievement. The film treats the 1980 version as something that happened rather than a style to be borrowed, and it earns its way back into those rooms by first building a world that does not need them.

Flanagan is a warm director. His camera stays with people, holds on faces, lets scenes run past the point at which a thriller would cut. In his own work that generosity is the whole appeal. Measured against Kubrick, whose power came from withholding, it reads as a different instinct entirely, and the film is at its strongest through the long middle stretch where nobody is asking him to be anyone else.

That stretch belongs to Rebecca Ferguson. Rose the Hat is played with a showman's charm, all hat brim and easy authority, and Ferguson locates something the script only half supplies: a woman who is enjoying her life. The True Knot are best when the film treats them as a touring company crossing America in campers, bored between engagements. They become less interesting as the rules of what they are get explained, and by the final act they have hardened into a set of conditions to be defeated rather than a presence to be survived.

The Director's Cut is the version to watch. Roughly half an hour longer, and almost none of it spectacle: it restores the connective scenes that let the middle move at its own speed, and it makes the shape of the whole thing legible in a way the theatrical version never quite manages. What neither cut can fix is the film's appetite for explanation. The shine is defined. The rules are stated aloud. Characters announce what they have understood at the moment they understand it, and every one of those lines buys clarity at the cost of unease.

That is the ceiling. Kubrick's hotel frightened people because it never accounted for itself, and Doctor Sleep accounts for everything, including the parts that worked better unaccounted for. It is a generous, confident and unusually intelligent film about material that had every reason to defeat it. It is not a frightening one, and it appears to know that, which is close enough to being enough.