After his family’s ordeal at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor) continues to be followed by the hotel’s ghosts, attracted to his “shine”. The ghost of Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly) teaches him how to capture the ghosts in lockboxes. By 2011, Dan has become an alcoholic because alcohol helps to suppress his psychic abilities. He moves to New Hampshire and recovers with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. As a hospice orderly, he finds that his powers can comfort patients facing death and he is called Doctor Sleep. A young girl named Abra Stone (Kyleigh Curran) with an even more powerful “shining” reaches out to him through telepathy and they form a psychic friendship.
Also, an old cult of psychic vampires led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) follows the True Knot, feeding on “steam” which is a psychic essence released by torturing and killing people with the shining. By 2019, they begin to run out of victims and are starving. They recruit a teenager named Snakebite Andi (Emily Alyn Lind) with the power of suggestion, but their gruesome killing of a young baseball player named Bradley Trevor (Jacob Tremblay) traumatizes Abra, who alerts Dan. Rose, who can sense Abra’s power, infiltrates Abra’s dreams but is trapped by Abra and the girl reads her knowledge. Rose the Hat sends True Knot members after her.
Abra divines the crime scene’s location and meets Dan in New Hampshire to ask for his help. Dan recruits Billy (Criss Curtis) and Abra’s father Dave Stone (Zachary Momoh). They kill most of the cult in an ambush, but Billy and Dave are killed and Abra is captured by Rose’s partner Crow Daddy Dan (Zahn McClaron). Dan possesses Abra and she causes Crow Daddy’s car to crash, killing him.
Knowing that Rose is coming for them, Dan brings Abra to the now-abandoned Overlook Hotel, where it all started. Dan resets his father’s ghost and sets the building’s boiler to overload. Rose arrives and overpowers Dan, but he releases the Overlook ghosts from the lockboxes. They are drawn to Rose’s power and devour her. Then they possess Dan to make him kill Abra, but he regains control of the boiler room. Abra escapes as the Overlook burns down. Later, Abra speaks to Dan’s spirit, who comforts her and tells her to shine on. She confronts an Overlook ghost and locks it in her psychic lockbox.
The film was written, directed, and edited by Mike Flanagan as an adaptation of Stephen King’s 2013 novel, a sequel to The Shining. The film was greenlighted after the success of the movie It. The difficult goal was to reconcile King’s book The Shining with the much-changed movie by Stanley Kubrick. It received generally positive reviews but the box-office was a disappointment compared with the recently-released It Chapter Two and Pet Sematary.
King wrote the book because he wondered what Danny Torrance would be like as an adult. Many themes and characters from The Shining were used in the process. King famously did not care for The Shining because some important themes in the book were ignored by Stanley Kubrick and this was a bid to correct that.
Danny Lloyd, who played young Danny Torrance in The Shining, appeared in a cameo. There was talk of de-aging Nicholson, who was retired, or casting a Nicholson impersonator, or casting someone like him, but thankfully, in the end, nothing came of it. But most of the music of The Shining was used. The film received 78% on Rotten Tomatoes. Rose the Hat was a charming villain, not the first time that a villain was the best character in a movie.
Kyleigh Curran was well-liked by audiences, as was Ewan McGregor. Many critics and reviewers were pleasantly surprised that a good film came out of all the conflict. I loved it, frankly. The Shining was a great but rather perplexing movie. This one had a kind of action-movie vibe to it, with a band of likable heroes, a gang of truly evil killers, and a brilliant but arrogant villain as likely to make you chuckle as hiss at her.