Dan Torrance and the True Knot: Doctor Sleep

Doctor Sleep (2019) is a supernatural horror film written, directed and edited by Mike Flanagan. It adapts Stephen King‘s 2013 novel and also serves as a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Ewan McGregor plays Dan Torrance, now an adult with psychic powers, a drinking problem and deep scars from the Overlook Hotel. He has to protect a girl with an even stronger “shine,” Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), from Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson) and the True Knot, a cult of psychic vampires. Flanagan set out to reconcile King’s novel with Kubrick’s very different film, and King said it redeemed everything he had disliked about Kubrick’s version. Critics liked it, but it disappointed at the box office.

At a glance

Release date	October 21, 2019 (Regency Village Theater premiere); October 31, 2019 (international); November 8, 2019 (US)
Director	Mike Flanagan
Writer	Mike Flanagan (screenplay)
Based on	Doctor Sleep (2013) by Stephen King
Starring	Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
Runtime	152 minutes (theatrical); 180 minutes (director’s cut)
Rating	R (US), for disturbing and violent content, some bloody images, language, nudity and drug use
Budget	$45 million to $55 million (estimates)
Box office	$72.4 million
Franchise	Sequel to The Shining (1980)

Plot summary

After his family’s ordeal at the Overlook, young Danny Torrance is still haunted by the hotel’s ghosts, who want his “shine.” The spirit of Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly) teaches him to lock them away in psychic “lockboxes.” By 2011, Dan (Ewan McGregor) is drinking to dull his gift. He drifts to New Hampshire, gets sober through Alcoholics Anonymous with the help of his friend Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis), and works as a hospice orderly. There he uses the shining to comfort dying patients, earning the nickname “Doctor Sleep.” A girl named Abra Stone, whose power is far greater than his, reaches out to him telepathically.

Elsewhere, the True Knot, an ancient cult led by Rose the Hat, survive by feeding on “steam,” the psychic essence released when people with the shining are tortured to death. By 2019 their prey is getting scarce. When they murder a young baseball player, Abra senses it. Rose senses Abra in turn and decides the girl’s enormous power could feed the cult for years. Abra turns to Dan for help.

Spoiler section: the ending

Dan, Billy and Abra’s father ambush and kill most of the True Knot, but Billy and Abra’s father die, and Rose’s partner, Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon), kidnaps Abra. Dan takes control of Abra’s mind and crashes Crow Daddy’s car. Knowing Rose will come for them, Dan brings Abra to the abandoned Overlook. There he meets the bartender (Henry Thomas), who looks like his father, and refuses a drink. Then he opens his lockboxes, and the hotel’s ghosts devour Rose before possessing him. He regains control long enough to let the overloaded boiler explode, sees a vision of his mother comforting him, and dies as the Overlook burns, just as Jack does at the end of King’s original novel. Later, Dan’s spirit visits Abra, telling her to “shine on.”

Production and behind the scenes

Warner Bros. began developing the novel by 2014, and Akiva Goldsman wrote a script, but the studio would not commit a budget until It (2017) became a hit. In January 2018, Flanagan was hired to rewrite it and direct, drawn to its themes of “childhood trauma leading into adulthood, addiction, the breakdown of a family.” King had two conditions: the Overlook would not appear, and the novel’s ending would stay. He first rejected Flanagan’s plan to return to Kubrick’s hotel, then agreed after Flanagan pitched the climax there. After reading the finished script, King said, “Everything that I ever disliked about the Kubrick version of The Shining is redeemed for me here.”

Because so many years had passed, characters from The Shining were recast. Flanagan rejected digital de-aging as disrespectful (“like we were making a video game”) and looked for actors who would “tilt people’s memories” toward the originals “without ever tipping into parody.” Alex Essoe plays Wendy, Carl Lumbly plays Hallorann, Roger Dale Floyd plays young Danny, and Henry Thomas plays the bartender and Jack in recreated flashbacks. Producer Trevor Macy said Jack Nicholson was supportive but retired, and he declined an offer of a cameo. Filming took place in Georgia, in and around Atlanta and at St. Marys and St. Simons, from September to December 2018. Like Kubrick, Flanagan avoided jump scares. The Newton Brothers’ score borrows heavily from the music of The Shining, including a reworked version of its main theme.

Release and reception

Warner Bros. showed its confidence by moving the release up from January 2020. The film opened internationally on Halloween 2019 and in the US on November 8, but debuted to only $14.1 million and lost the top spot to Midway. Deadline blamed the two-and-a-half-hour runtime and its appeal to older viewers. It finished with $31.6 million in the US and Canada and $72.4 million worldwide, well below that year’s other King films, It Chapter Two and Pet Sematary. Critics were warmer. It holds 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and 59 on Metacritic, with a “B+” CinemaScore. Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com wrote that Flanagan was “talented enough to pull off this difficult blend of legacies,” and McGregor, Ferguson and Curran were widely praised. A three-hour director’s cut was released on home video.

Legacy and influence

Doctor Sleep is unusual among King adaptations because it tries to satisfy both King and Kubrick. It returns to Kubrick’s Overlook while bringing back the redemption and sacrifice King felt the 1980 film had cut. Flanagan said Dan’s arc is essentially Jack’s story from the novel, with Dan and Abra taking the places of Jack and Danny in its climax. King had disliked the 1980 film for dropping themes that were personal to him, especially alcoholism and its toll on a family. Flanagan read these as King’s fear of what his drinking could do to his family, “and he wrote himself hope and sacrifice at the end.” Before release, Warner Bros. hired him to write Hallorann, a prequel about Dick Hallorann, but dropped it after the box office disappointment. Flanagan has said he would like to make a sequel about Abra, and King has said he is open to the idea. Talk of a Hallorann spin-off has returned since HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry.

Trivia

Danny Lloyd, the original young Danny, has a cameo as a spectator at the baseball game. He hadn’t acted in about 38 years and was contacted by Flanagan on Twitter.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Slater were among the ideas considered for Jack before Henry Thomas was cast.
The bartender calls himself Lloyd, the name of Joe Turkel’s character in The Shining.
Flanagan also edited the film.
Rebecca Ferguson said the scene in which the True Knot kills a young boy was difficult to film.