Doctor Sleep

Mike Flanagan’s 2019 film follows Dan Torrance, still marked by the Overlook Hotel. He works as a hospice orderly, sitting with the dying and easing them out, which earns him the name Doctor Sleep. Abra, a girl with a far stronger shining, asks his help against Rose the Hat’s group, which kills gifted children to feed. The film answers to two works: Stephen King’s 2013 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film. King first refused to let the Overlook return, then relented when Flanagan pitched the scene where Dan wakes the hotel and finds his father tending the bar. King later said the script redeemed everything he had disliked about Kubrick’s version. That is where the endings separate. In King’s The Shining the hotel burns when the boiler is overloaded, while Kubrick left it standing, so Flanagan gives the father’s ending to Dan. Dan lives in King’s sequel novel; in the film he does not. The interiors were rebuilt in Atlanta from blueprints lent by the Kubrick estate, and Wendy, Hallorann and the bartender were recast, not de-aged. A good fit if you want the return to the Overlook to be a reconstruction, not an impression. Not for a viewer expecting the hotel throughout; the film reaches it only in its last stretch, and opens by showing a child killed.