The mind is a blackboard and this is the eraser (Dr. Sleep 2020)

253.
Dr. Sleep

7.5/10


Back to a genre that is by a long way my favourite. Horror movies make you feel like no other genre has the ability too. It can keep you on the edge of your seat waiting for a jump scare or it can leave you feeling psychologically uneasy, depending on where the story wants to take you. This time we have a sequel to The Shining which was a novel from 1977. This book was written in 2013 and hopefully, it can make more of an impression on Stephen King than The Shining movie adaptation did as it is well known that King hates the movie. If you've not seen The Shining, some scenes are recognised to the world anyway. The little boy on his tricycle, going through the corridors of the creepy hotel is going to be our main character in this movie. Ewan McGregor is going to be Danny Torrence, decades after his old man had tried to kill the family with an axe. Rebecca Ferguson, fresh of the back of The Greatest Showman and Mission Impossible is also about so let's see if this is up there with the other King adaptations. 

The movie begins not long after the events at the Overlook Hotel and Danny is still seeing the ghosts from the hotel but this time, in his own home. He has befriended a ghost, who teaches him how to lock these spirits away in a box inside his head. They have moved from the hotel to chase him down since they are now starving. They feed on his psychic ability called 'The Shining'. Elsewhere, some psychic vampires are tracking down kids with the ability, so that they can feed off of the steam that is produced when they are tortured. This then lengthens their lifespan. Keeping up so far?

Decades on from the first scene, Danny is now an alcoholic to suppress his ability and once he steals some money off a woman after a one night stand, he knows he has hit a new low and it's time for a new start. Heading to a new town, he starts to turn his life around until he is contacted by a young girl, also with 'the shining' but her talents are a lot stronger. During this time, Danny earns his name of Doctor Sleep as he works as an orderly, being around the patient's last moments and using his ability to comfort them in some way. On the other side of the US, Ferguson's character, Rose the Hat, has been recruiting but letting a girl feed off the steam of a child we had seen them kill earlier.

Another 8 years pass, the girl that has been getting in contact with Danny, Abra Stone, has now been experiencing a lot more. Every time Rose takes life with her gang named the True Knot, she feels it drastically. The main problem, Rose can see her watching. This now sets a massive target on her back. Abra contacts Danny by writing MURDER on his wall with her ability, read backward it's REDRUM, just as the door in The Shining.

 Realizing the danger and lack of help from Danny, Abra ends up tracking him down knowing that she can track down the cult with her ability. Instead, Danny is pretty pissed off to see her and tells her to suppress her ability to stay safe. The cult is starving and Rose sends her consciousness across the country to find Abra but instead, finds a trap once infiltrating her mind. She is injured and around the campfire, a member dies and Rose sends the rest out after Abra. 

Danny's ghosts comes for a visit one more time, telling him to protect Abra has Danny was once protected. Recruiting a few more, including Abra's father to protect her body as she projects herself to a campsite elsewhere, the fight is on. Most of the cult gets killed but the girl who was recruited earlier, Andi, makes Danny's mate kill himself. Back at Abra's house, the dad is killed in a raid and Abra is abducted in a hidden plot. She is drugged, unable to use her full ability but she instead lets Danny control her body to overpower the driver and crash the van. This leads to a reunion of Danny and Abra whilst Rose consumes the remaining steam and heads for revenge.

 With one last plan, Danny takes Abra up to the famous hotel. An ongoing fight with Danny's consciousness and Rose as they try to trap her in one of his boxes means that we get a lot of links to the first movie, including the hedge maze. Once she gets the better of Danny, Rose starts feeding on his steam and he's only got one left play to make. He releases all of the old ghosts within his mind which brutally kill Rose and make their way after an injured Danny. He quickly becomes possessed and chases Abra around the hotel, to that once-famous room.

 As he first entered into the hotel, he starts pissing about in the boiler room, he knew it may come to this. He overcomes the ghosts for a short second and tells Abra to escape. He heads back to the boiler room and before the hotel can stop him, he starts a fire, bringing down the hotel once and for all. A vision of his young self being protected by his mother comes to light as the fire begins to take over. 

A while later and Abra is talking to Danny's spirit. She tells him that they are going to be alright, as even her mother is now coming to terms with her ability and talking to her deceased husband. As Abra's mother leaves the room, Abra heads to the bathroom where we see the ghost of the rotting woman from the hotel, the one we saw a young Danny lock away into his first box, just as Abra is about to do.

Not one to read books, or even listen to them as you can these days, which sometimes can put me on the back foot a little. It had been a long time since I had seen The Shining and if I'm honest, a couple of things came back to me when watching some of Ready Player One. With the beginning of this one and the scenes back at the hotel, the first movie did start flowing back. Stephen King movies are flowing out write now with the IT movies and Pet Cemetary, but where does this one rank? To be honest, somewhere around the middle for the latest movies. It was enjoyable and dark and not just a killing spree, there were some underlying issues of how Danny had controlled himself since the terrifying events of the decades before and how he turned protector for a young girl. There was plenty of dark, as we come to know from a King novel and as what seems to be the norm with him, some children getting killed. I have heard that the hotel was actually in bits after the first book but not so in the movie and that was indeed carried on with this one too. I not sure about Dr. Sleep the novel, as to whether the hotel was brought back in such a light but only time will tell. The storyline had more than enough to keep me gripped and at times, I honestly didn't know which side was ahead of the other. Plenty of twists and turns and sure as hell, I did not expect the sacrifice. 

Ewan Mcgregor gave this role a great go. There were moments that you could sympathise with him, be in complete disagreement with him and then finally, accept his flaws for the ending that he indeed gave. Kyleigh Curran as Abra was played extremely well. At times it can be a little bit of a struggle watching an unknown youngster on the screen and a lot of the time they are robotic and never seen again. Kyleigh's role needed action and a form of innocence at the same time and this was balanced well. At times, she was the adult and showed immense bravery throughout the ordeal.

The film had a big contrast between good and evil and each scene resembled this. The scenes focusing on Danny and Abra's side of the story would always be during the day, bright and airy, whilst the Cult scenes were always taken at night, inside some mobile homes or sneaking around the dark, abducting children. This was a good switch throughout the movie. It would then mean that we expect the movie to end in a sun-kissed moment but instead, it took a few minutes of heading back into the darkness for us to realise that the story would never be over for Abra. I wonder if Stephen King was a fan?