Ewan McGregor will star as grown-up Danny Torrance in the film version of Doctor Sleep, Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining, according to Variety.
The book picks up with Torrance in middle age, still haunted by demons both real and internal. He works as a hospice nurse, using his psychic powers to ease the transition for dying patients, but he’s also fighting for sobriety, the same addiction that made his dad so vulnerable to the evil forces lingering around the Overlook Hotel decades before.
The movie is being directed by Hush and Oculus filmmaker Mike Flanagan, whose previous thriller Gerald’s Game was also an adaptation of a King novel.
The question is how much the film will follow King’s novel, and how much it will be pulled by Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining.
As King himself told EW when the book was released: “One of the things — and I’m not sure if this is going to be a problem for readers or not — is that Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the novel. It’s not a sequel to the Kubrick film. At the end of the Kubrick film, the Overlook is still there. It just kind of freezes. But at the end of the book, it burns down.”
While parts of the novel do take place amid the ruins of the hotel, on that sacred/poisoned land that focuses sinister unseen energies, most of Doctor Sleep is a road movie.
There are physical supernatural beings trying to prey on Dan Torrance this time. The True Knot is a group of vampire-like immortals who nourish themselves on the energy of those with psychic abilities. Their victims die in extreme agony.
Along the way, Torrance finds himself protecting a young girl named Abra, who has an even more potent version of “the shine.”