Willing to Overlook

We watched Doctor Sleep (2019), based on Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining. Even though I still haven’t seen the Kubrick movie, I really liked this.

It starts with little Danny Torrance, haunted by the naked old bathtub lady from the Overlook Hotel. The ghost of Not-Scatman-Crothers (Carl Lumbly) teaches Danny how to lock these spirits into spirit boxes, which helps quite a bit.

However, at a campground, Rebecca Ferguson, as Rose the Hat, lures a little girl into her clutches, then spirits her away with a flock of campers.

Now, in present day, we meet Ewan McGregor as Danny. We find him in bed with a coke whore with a sick hangover. She has also stolen his money, so he steals her - even though she has a hungry little girl. Even Lumbly tells him this is going too far, and he’s dead. So he spends the money on a ticket as far as he can go and winds up in a little town in New Hampshire - with a little model of the town in the town square. This is an odd little detail that I don’t think pays off, but lets director Mike Flanagan include a shot where the foreground buildings turn out to be tiny, due to perspective. No pay off, but weird.

He meets a nice guy, Cliff Curtis, who helps him find a place to live and an AA meeting. He gets a job in a nursing home. When the death cat (you know about death cats?) predicts someone will die, he uses his psychic powers to calm then before the big sleep. This earns him the name in the title.

Meanwhile, a young girl named Abra Stone (Kayleigh Curran) is discovering that she has psychic powers, very powerful powers. Rose the Hat and her gang, who feed off of the fear and death of Shiners, are noticing her too. So does McGregor. This movie has a lot of balls in the air, but that’s the basic setup: Rose and her gang torture and kill kids who have the Shining. Stone and Torrance will have to keep them from eating them.

One of the fun things about this movie is that the protagonists are as powerful, smart and aggressive as the bad guys. Little Abra gets more than a few licks in, and Danny and his AA sponsor go from zero to mass murder (of the enemy) in the time it takes to drive to Iowa (I think they passed the Children of the Corn on the way). And it all ends up back at the Overlook Hotel, which has been closed, but is still super haunted.

I liked that there was so much going on, but this movie is two-and-a-half to three hours long. One of the most striking scenes is when Rose the Hat astral projects and goes looking for Abra. I sort of fell asleep a little way into this scene, then woke up to find that it was still going on. After a while, I dozed off again, then woke up, and yup, still astrally projecting. I’m saying, they could have trimmed this.

So, I guess I should watch The Shining, right?