Stanley Kubrick’s (“A Clockwork Orange”) “The Shining” was a masterpiece of modern day cinema, nevertheless it didn’t leave its audience with any real burning desire to want to know whatever happened to Danny (Danny Lloyd), due to him being the film’s least engaging character, ranking well behind non-developed characters like the withered hag (Billie Gibson) and the twins (Lisa and Louise Burns) of the bloodied corridor.

 

However, Stephen King, who venomously declared Kubrick’s film adaption of his novel a complete bastardisation, feels we should, and thereon in we have been given the belated sequel “Doctor Sleep”. “Doctor Sleep” follows Danny (Ewan McGregor), or Dan as he’s best known here, who’s now all grown up. After his “Overlook Hotel” ordeal Dan is now a fully-fledged member of the hedonistic club; he’s a hard drinker that regularly rounds off his evenings with a bar fight and sharing his bed with a local stranger. Eventually Danny, who carries a rucksack of troubles, wariness, self-pity, exhaustion, sadness and a royal bitch of a hangover, comes to the realisation that he needs to straighten out his life or die trying, so he gets a job in a hospice, where he uses his telepathy to soothe the dying.

 

Like most of Stephen King’s adaptions, “IT 2” being the worst offender, tranquility’s tide turns with Danny being thrown into hell’s mouth melodrama of “Days of Our Lives” proportions when a young girl (Kyliegh Curran) interrupts his newly found idyll through telepathic communication, drawing the attention of The True Knot, a rag-tag gang of psychic leeches led by Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), who absorb victims’ life force.