Director: Mike Flanagan
Writers: Stephen King, Mike Flanagan
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran
Run Time: 2 Hours, 32 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2Xdgp82
Synopsis
We begin in 1980 in Florida. A little girl named Violet meets a woman named “Rose the Hat” and her creepy friends. They converge all around her, and it fades to black. Credits roll.
We get some flashbacks to “The Shining” where little Danny sees something creepy in the bathroom. Danny later has a long conversation with Hallorann, the bald groundskeeper, and they talk about “The Shining” some more. If you remember, Hallorann died in the first movie, so this is obviously a ghost.
We then fast forward to 2011, where Danny is now Ewan McGregor’s age. Danny is an addict who sleeps under a bridge but travels a lot because he still sees dead people. He gets a job working for Billy, who sets him up with a really nice apartment. He still sees dead people all the time. He gets a job as an orderly for a doctor and he “sees people off” as they die. An old, dying patient calls Danny “Doctor Sleep.”
Rose the Hat watches a fifteen-year-old girl named Snakebite Andi, lure a man into a movie theater and then put him to “sleep,” then rob him and leave a mark on his face with a knife. She preys on pedophiles. Rose calls her a “pusher” and they’re pretty rare.
There’s a little girl named Abra who can do telekinesis and other things. Rose and her friends initialize Andi with a special ritual.
We jump ahead eight more years, so it’s 2019. Danny is completely clean and sober now, and Rose the Hat and her friends all look completely unchanged, except the there’s not enough magical steam in the world, and they’re all getting hungry. We see that they suck the life-force, or “steam” out of young people with special powers. Abra senses this and sends a message to Danny: “Redrum.” Not long after, Abra comes to town to meet Doctor Sleep.
Eventually, everything convenes back at the Overlook hotel, which is just like we remember it, only hungrier.
Commentary
They recast all the actors from The Shining to reprise the roles for flashbacks and new scenes. They also rebuilt most of the Overlook’s sets for the final climax, which was pretty cool.
The majority of the story overall doesn’t have a great deal to do with The Shining other than the one main character, until the final half hour at the Overlook, which definitely ties in with the original in a big way.
The first two hours actually feel a lot like a slow-paced, extra-creepy X-Men film. The villains have their well-organized and trained super-team, and the good guys just have to get their act together before the climactic battle. Actually, if you forget the Stephen King/Shining connection and look at it as a dark superhero story, it’s actually quite good.
This got pretty awful reviews when it came out, and Stephen King overall has a pretty rotten record with films, but this was actually quite good. I liked it more than I thought I would, and a lot more than the wheel-spinning drivel that was It from the same year.