The last time Room breakout Jacob Tremblay teamed with director Mike Flanagan it was for the famously-maligned horror Before I Wake, which went through years of Hell before it actually got released by Netflix. Chances are their reunion for Doctor Sleep will find a much easier path, seeing as it’s a sequel to Stephen King’s classic, The Shining.
TMZ reports Tremblay has joined the cast of Doctor Sleep, which will star Ewan McGregor as an adult Danny Torrance. While it’s unconfirmed, there’s a better than average chance Tremblay is playing a younger version of Danny, who is gifted with a special power known as “the shining.” The sequel’s story finds Danny protecting Abra (Kyliegh Curran), who has the same gift. Rebecca Ferguson plays cult leader Rose the Hat, with Carl Lumbly, Bruce Greenwood, Alex Essoe, and Zahn McClarnon in other roles.
Here’s the synopsis from King’s novel: On highways across America, a tribe of people called the True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, the True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the steam that children with the shining produce when they are slowly tortured to death.
Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel, where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant shining power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”
Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, glorious story that will thrill the millions of devoted readers of The Shining and satisfy anyone new to this icon in the Stephen King canon.
Doctor Sleep opens January 24th 2020.
