The Daily Stream becomes the Daily Scream for spooky season!
It’s not often that we can call a horror film beautiful and unexpectedly delicate, but damned if that doesn’t apply to 2019’s Doctor Sleep. A sequel to The Shining, and based on a Stephen King novel, this is the tale of Danny Torrance (Ewan MeGregor, in one of his best performances ever), now all grown up and not coping at all well with his own psychic powers or the legacy of what happened in that remote, snowed-in hotel in the Colorado Rockies when he was a little boy.
The villains here, such as Rebecca Ferguson’s chilling predator “Rose the Hat,” are more richly drawn than we typically get from the genre, and unnervingly empathetic. But most disturbing is the film’s rare honesty, its undismissableness, in how it cements the strange and supernatural as undeniably authentic. Usually we have to suspend our disbelief to buy into a movie like this. The fact that that seems unnecessary here? That’s really scary. (Read my 2019 review.)
US: stream on Hulu and Max (via Prime); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Doctor Sleep at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
