MEDIA: Film Review –
November 8, 2019 – They call Dan, who as a child had the nickname “Doc,” Doctor Sleep. But Dan’s stability is rocked by the appearance of a girl with a shine 100 times more powerful than his. She’s called Abra (as in cadabra) and is played by the marvelous newcomer Kyliegh Curran, who, mark my words, is going places. So is her character.
Abra shines so brightly that she is soon forced to go on the run, with Dan as her mentor. Abra, you see, has drawn the unwanted attention of Rose (Rebecca Ferguson), the leader of a hippie-ish cult of quasi-immortal beings who call themselves the True Knot, and who travel around the country in a caravan of RVs hunting down children with the shine. What do they do with them? They murder them, inhaling their terrified souls — or “steam” — like pot smoke, which extends the cultists’ lives indefinitely. In one unfortunate bit of on-the-nose dialogue, this soul-sucking is characterized as “eating” the children’s screams and “drinking” their pain…
