Doctor Sleep

In 1980, sometime after escaping the Overlook Hotel, Danny Torrance and his mother Wendy live in Florida. Scarred by his experiences, Danny is haunted by one of its ghosts—the rotting woman of Room 217. Through “the shining”, the ghost of Dick Hallorann teaches him to lock such ghosts in imaginary “boxes” in his mind. Meanwhile, a cult of quasi-immortal psychic vampires[ known as the True Knot, led by Rose the Hat, feed on “steam”, a psychic essence produced in the dying moments of people with the shining ability, to slow their aging.

In 2011, Danny (now going by “Dan”) is still traumatized by his time at the Overlook and has become an alcoholic to suppress his shining. He moves to a small town in New Hampshire and befriends Billy Freeman, who gets him a job and becomes his AA sponsor. Dan begins to rehabilitate and soon finds a job at a hospice where there is a cat who goes to patients who are dying. Danny uses his shining to comfort dying patients, who give him the nickname “Doctor Sleep”. He also begins receiving telepathic communications from Abra Stone, a young girl whose shining is even more powerful than his. Meanwhile, Rose recruits a teenager named “Snakebite Andi” into her cult after observing her ability to telepathically control people.

In 2019, the True Knot are starving. They abduct a young boy named Bradley and torture him to death to extract as much steam as they can. A teenage Abra senses the event, and her distress alerts both Dan and Rose. Rose sets her sights on Abra, planning to extract her steam to sustain the cult. Realizing that Rose is after her, Abra visits Dan and says she can track the cult if she can touch Bradley’s baseball glove, but Dan insists that she stay away and avoid drawing attention to herself. That night, Rose enters her astral form and successfully enters Abra’s mind. However, Abra easily retaliates by entering

Rose’s mind and injuring her hand. Wounded, Rose returns to her body and sends the True Knot to capture Abra.

The cat leads Dan to an empty room where he has another visit from Hallorann, who instructs him to protect Abra. Dan tells Billy about the shining, and they travel to the murder scene and exhume Bradley’s body to retrieve his glove. They then go to Abra’s house, where they recruit her father Dave and devise a plan. Using an astral projection of Abra as bait, Dan and Billy lure the cult members to a local campsite and shoot most of them dead, although Snakebite Andi telepathically manipulates Billy into killing himself before she dies.

Rose’s lover, Crow Daddy, kills Dave and abducts Abra, drugging her to suppress her shine. Dan communicates with Abra, who allows him to possess her temporarily and force Crow Daddy to crash his car, killing him and freeing Abra. While Dan and Abra reunite, Rose consumes the cult’s remaining stockpile of steam, healing her wounds and vowing revenge for their deaths. Dan decides to return to the abandoned Overlook, believing it will be as dangerous for Rose as it is for him and Abra. He starts up the hotel’s boiler and explores the building, “awakening” it in the process. Dan revisits the rooms where his father Jack, influenced by the Overlook, attempted to murder him and Wendy. At the hotel bar, Dan is offered whiskey by the ghost of his father Jack, who presents himself as a bartender named “Lloyd”. They both discuss what drives a person to alcoholism, the “ghosts” of the past and troubles of the present, while alcohol becomes “the medicine”. Lloyd insists Dan take the drink, but he refuses.

Once Rose arrives at the hotel, Dan and Abra confront her by pulling her into the astral plane in the form of the Overlook’s hedge maze. After a failed attempt to trap her in one of the boxes, Dan instructs Abra to flee before being overpowered by Rose. As she drains his steam and enters his mind, Dan releases the Overlook’s ghosts from his boxes who surround and kill Rose. However, the ghosts possess Dan, who begins to hunt for Abra. When she manages to momentarily free him, he tells her to flee the hotel. Struggling with possession, Dan returns to the boiler room, which becomes engulfed in flames. In his last moment, Dan sees a vision of himself as a child being embraced by his mother Wendy. Abra watches helplessly as the hotel burns down.

Sometime later, Abra talks to Dan’s spirit, assuring each other they will both be okay, before he disappears. Abra’s mother Lucy adjusts to her daughter’s powers, including a communication from the spirit of her deceased husband. Abra is confronted by the ghost of the rotting woman from the Overlook and prepares to lock her up just as Danny did. Classification: 15