‘Doctor Sleep’ scene will bring back memories
Spoilers ahead! What follows discusses a major reveal and the ending of the Stephen King movie “Doctor Sleep,” a sequel to “The Shining.”
The new Stephen King horror sequel “Doctor Sleep” brings back one of cinema’s most infamous antagonists, albeit wielding a bottle of booze instead of his usual weapon of destruction.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic “The Shining” introduced Danny Torrance, a young boy with psychic abilities whose father Jack (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as a caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, a haunted locale that possesses Jack and reverts him to his violent, alcoholic ways. His wife and son escape, and Jack winds up freezing to death.
“Doctor Sleep” picks up where “The Shining” left off, with a grown-up Dan (Ewan McGregor) battling his own addiction issues. Now sober, Dan helps a young girl with abilities, Abra (Kyliegh Curran), escape psychic vampire Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). But to truly defeat her, Dan and Abra have to coax Rose to the Overlook, which has been boarded up and abandoned but still houses a variety of ghosts.
Dan revisits the places where Jack chased him with an axe, and in the film’s most riveting scene Dan enters the hotel’s Gold Room and sits at the bar, where he realizes a familiar face is serving him a drink: his dad (Henry Thomas), now a ghost at the Overlook.
“It was a profoundly cool opportunity for Dan to have this conversation not only with his father but with his own addiction,” writer/director Mike Flanagan says. “That was the scene that made me want to make the film.”
Jack’s reappearance is a callback to two “Shining” personalities who interacted with Nicholson’s character: ghostly Gold Room waiter Delbert Grady, the Overlook’s previous caretaker, and Lloyd the bartender, the stoic guy Jack vents to about his family as he falls off the wagon.
But in the “Doctor Sleep” version of the scene, Dan refuses the drink and poignantly chronicles his life and troubles since that childhood trauma as bartender Jack listens.
“Kubrick had shown us the way,” Flanagan explains. “That is kind of the fate that befalls some of these ghosts at the Overlook: They just become part of the staff (and) deny any memory of who they were in life.”
McGregor was surprised by just how emotional the scene became. “(Dan) suffered from his dad’s violence, his dad’s alcoholism, and here he is given a chance to try and get him to apologize,” the actor says. “Ultimately, what’s at the heart of it is he wants to be loved by his father. And he has this opportunity in that moment for his father to say, ‘I’m sorry, I love you.’ ”
When Flanagan recruited Thomas, he told him the part would require only a single day of filming but “every single move you make will be scrutinized like you wouldn’t believe.”
Flanagan knew that bringing Jack back would be a “lightning rod.” “People were going to hate that it existed at all, no matter what we did,” the director says. “So there was a lot of care that went into it.
“To me, it represented the heart of not only Dan’s journey but why you go back to the Overlook at all. If you’re going to go back to confront the past, how can you do it without that scene?”