The Reach is a pretty moving little nugget from Stephen King’s arsenal of short tales. Haunting, uplifting, and allegorical as fuck. Since everything he’s written but this morning’s grocery list (coming this fall from Lionsgate) have been adapted or optioned it should come as no surprise that The Reach is being shopped at Cannes (per The Hollywood Reporter) as a feature. Budgeted in the mid teens, it’s a perfect vehicle for Judy Dench, Helen Mirren, or some other bankable older broad who could pass for someone forever years old in a pinch.
For those who don’t have the requisite six years of uninterrupted reading needed to know all of King’s work, it’s about a woman who has a terminal disease and makes the long pilgrimage to the mainland she’s never known when a freeze makes the waterway passable. Having lived her entire life on an island and having lived a long life of ups and downs she’s visited by those who came before along her way.
It’s mystical and spooky and charming. It’s everything Maximum Overdrive wasn’t.
Here’s hoping the producers get their coins to make it. There’s never enough “old bitch on an ice bridge” on screens.