5 Questions I Still Have After Seeing ‘Doctor Sleep’
[Warning: all the spoilers for Doctor Sleep, ahead. No joke, I’m going to talk about that ending right away.]
Guys, I’ve been excited for Doctor Sleep, the follow-up to the ’80s horror classic The Shining, since the first teaser trailer dropped about four months ago. For one, The Shining may be one of the scariest movies of all time. For two, Ewan McGregor can still get it. Let me tell you, I was not disappointed.
I may not have been alive when the film first hit theaters in 1980, but I’ve still been haunted by memories of Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) slow-burn descent into madness, which ultimately led him to chase his wife around the very haunted Overlook Hotel with an ax while his son Danny tries to use his special gifts, “the shining,” to warn the outside world about what’s going down.
But the horror show inside the Overlook Hotel is not the problem in Doctor Sleep, it’s the solution. The now-adult Dan Torrance (Ewan) has conquered the ghosts of the hotel, which have followed him around since the events of The Shining, by locking them in boxes inside his head. It takes years, but he finally has a handle on the trauma of his past and his battle with alcoholism. He’s even found a use for his “shining”: He comforts hospice patients who are about to die.
That all goes tits up when the young Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran) starts contacting him through her own powers. At first, they’re sort of just magical pen pals, until Abra has visions of a campy group of hippie villains who target children with the shining and vape their souls/pain/life force. I’m serious, they call the misty soul substance “steam” and basically shotgun it in order to live forever. They’re led by my new fave baddie Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), who’s into yoga and meditation and murdering children. Her wardrobe alone...but let’s not digress.
While Danny and Abra are able to whittle the cult down to just Rose through mind games and guns, the evil yoga master vapes, like, five whole thermoses of steam and becomes kind of unstoppable. In order to kill her, Danny and Abra lure her to the Overlook Hotel. There, he unleashes all those locked-up spirits, who are starving. They devour Rose as well as Danny, who has lit the place on fire while Abra escapes (TG).
The Overlook burns down, but that doesn’t mean the spirits died with it. They’re after Abra now, but thanks to Danny—whose spirit she’s still able to talk to—she knows just how to lock them up. It’s not a definitive ending, that’s for sure, but it’s a satisfying one.
Still, I have some questions that I feel should be addressed:
Why are the kids’ powers called “the shining”?
When Abra first comes in physical contact with Danny, she asks him about her “magic.” He tells her that he’s always called it “the shining.” From that point on, it’s “the shining.” “Magic” makes more sense to me, but okay, I guess.
I need more info about all that soul vaping...
The True Knot cult goes after children with powers, saying the steam is more potent when their victims are in pain. So are they eating their screams of pain, their souls, or what? How does that keep them alive and young? Are they surviving on the kids’ spirits? If so, is that the same as the spirits devouring Rose at the end? Will it make them stronger and harder for Abra to lock away?
How come Snakebite Andi is such a hypocrite?
A super minor point that no one will care about but me: Rose and the cult find a young woman with the shining who uses her powers to control and steal from men who target and take advantage of young women like herself. Instead of just devouring her steam, they offer to make her one of them. She agrees and goes on to victimize literal children. That’s messed up.
Why’d they have to do Jacob Tremblay like that?
Speaking of messed up, the most gruesome part of the movie is when Rose’s hippie cult kidnaps a little boy after his baseball game and tortures him back at their camp, making him scream and writhe as they suck down his steam.
This moment is made worse by the fact that the little boy is Jacob Tremblay, the kid from Room and all those adorable Oscar selfies. He’s not only one of the cutest child actors in the game, but he’s also extremely talented. I needed that scene to end, like, two seconds in. No joke, those screams actually showed up in my nightmares.
Why are they so obsessed with the naked grandma ghost?
At the beginning of the movie, Danny flashes back to the ghosts he’s locked up in his mind boxes. More than any other, we see him focus on a naked old woman in his bathroom. He’s terrified of her until his “imaginary” friend tells him how to make her go away. We see her again when he lets all the ghosts free.
But then, to show us that young Abra is also haunted by the Overlook ghosts, the same naked woman shows up in her bathroom. At this point, most people in my theater laughed. Like, couldn’t she face off against literally any other ghost?
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